Barbara (***1/2)

Say “East Germany” to someone and it sounds nearly quaint, like other terms —Y2k, say — that seem in retrospect to have been obviously ephemeral. Other films I’ve seen set in the former German Democratic Republic — Goodbye Lenin,  The Lives of Others, and Beloved Berlin Wall — seem to reinforce that by taking place on the cusp of change, in Berlin. They rely on the fall of the Berlin Wall to provide a happy ending and a dramatic plot point. But, of course, the astonishing events of 1989 would not have been obvious until close to when they happened. This suspenseful drama is set in a rural area and takes place much earlier, in 1982. Its title character (Nina Hoss) is a doctor whose arrival in a remote town stirs the curiosity of her male colleague (Ronald Zehrfeld).

Barbara’s past, and the reason she has left Berlin, are mysterious. Barbara is a reserved person, by nature as much as by necessity, one senses. It would be difficult to make a film about a place like East Germany that does not reflect the near total control of the state over the everyday lives of its citizens. But the film reflects not only the most dramatic aspects of state oppression, but the efforts of decent people to live their lives in ordinary ways. A major subplot concerns a young woman forced into a work camp, but in some ways a scene in which Barbara’s apartment is searched is more unsettling. As government functionaries calmly search the meager space for contraband, Barbara seems almost equally calm (though she is hiding something, and so likely not); their visit is no surprise at all.

Revelations of both character and story unfold in ways that make the quiet film more absorbing as it goes along. Difficult choices lie at the heart of the drama. I wanted someone to be able to tell these people that if they could just hang on for a few years, they’d be fine. But this movie is a reminder that the future is neither assured nor predictable.

IMDb link

viewed 10/24/12 7:10 pm [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 10/25/12–3/7/13

Beloved Berlin Wall (***1/4)

Sure East Germany was a ruthless police state, but there were things there to be nostalgic about, like the way a West German woman living near a checkpoint could cross into East Berlin and get some very fairly priced groceries. So it is that the perky heroine (Felicitas Woll) of this unusual romantic comedy winds up spilling her packages in view of one of the East German guards (Maxim Mehmet), who quickly descends his tower and comes to her aid.

Unlike an ordinary courtship, theirs is one of carefully arranged meetings and the frisson of danger. A single woman frequenting East Berlin could be a spy, could she not? It is 1989, and the democratic contagion in Poland and Hungary would soon spread west, but meanwhile the Stasi still went about its business. This is all explored with a good deal of cuteness, not entirely different from that in Goodbye, Lenin, the popular film that also displayed a certain kind of nostalgia about the communist era. But when someone does discover the whole affair, there is a stronger reminder of the truly nefarious nature of a totalitarian state. Yet the tone manages to stay light, and the last third of the film becomes a nearly farcical comedy of mistaken identities, questioned loyalties, and bureaucratic bumbling. Bordering on the contrived, it’s kind of clever and charming too.

IMDB link

viewed 4/12/11 at Ritz East [Cinefest 2011 screening] and reviewed 4/12/11

The Lives of Others (***3/4)

? When it came to intruding on the lives of ordinary citizens, the KGB had nothing on East Germany’s Stasi. Its 300,000 agents monitored a population numbering just 20 million. Germany’s upset victor for this year’s foreign-language Oscar follows a playwright who, with his actress girlfriend, becomes the subject of Stasi surveillance. At the same time, we follow the agent, a loyal socialist whose job it becomes to listen in on and interpret their conversations.
+ Information was the currency of the Stasi, and writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck depicts the state’s use of both electronic methods and human intelligence-gathering methods to acquire it. Von Donnersmarck’s heavily researched script shows the fears that the system relied on and the human feelings, ambition, jealousy, loneliness, and so forth, that a canopy of legalistic structures and misguided ideology could not obliterate. The story tends somewhat to the inevitable, but then doesn’t end there, and it’s the last act that sets the rest in relief. Even the color and light of the post-communism period is shocking compared to the drabness of most of the movie. (Both the look and even the sound of the bygone era are strikingly revived.)
- The story spends as much or more time with the playwright and his girlfriend as with the Stasi agent. I might have tilted the balance toward the character who makes the greatest transformation, one perhaps inadequately explained by the events in the film.
= ***1/2 If you’ve wondered what it was like to live in a static totalitarian regime where the personal and the political are inseparable, this re-creates a still-recent era with docudrama reality. (For another such perspective, check out the biographical Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, set in the Nazi era.)

IMDB link

reviewed 3/9/07