Barbara

 In 2009, a survey was conducted among people who had lived under the Communist regime in East Germany (the DDR).  Among Ossis surveyed 57% answered a survey question affirming that there were more good things about life in the DDR than bad.  As time progresses, there is a strong current of Ostalgie among people who lived for part of their lives under the Communists:  Vita-Cola, the DDR's equivalent to Coca-Cola, remains popular in Germany and, in fact, sells at a greater volume than its competitors in some former East German states.  The much-maligned Trabant has been revived.  Of course, the same lapse of time that has softened memories of life in the Stasi-surveillance State will, ultimately, eliminate Ostalgie as recollections of the old DDR fade.  One of Germany's most important contemporary writers, Judith Schalansky was born in Greifswald in the former DDR in 1980 --- although she has memories of life in East Germany, her recollections are faint and apolitical, after all she was just a small child in the old DDR..  Christian Petzold, the director of Barbara (2011), was born in 1960 in West Germany although he studied in Berlin --there is no nostalgia for the East in his movies and, indeed, Barbara, may be viewed as a corrective to any idea that there was whiff of decency in the Communist regime..  Indeed, Barbara is an uncompromising account of political repression in the context of pervasive spying with neighbors informing on neighbors in a provincial town in East Germany.  

Barbara (Nina Hoss), the titular character, is a physician, apparently a high-achiever, who previously worked at East Germany's prestigious Charite Hospital in Berlin.  Barbara is proud to the point of arrogance, beautiful, and stand-offish -- she is not hesitant to display her intelligence and skills in a way that humiliates her colleagues at the small provincial clinic to which the State has assigned her, apparently as a reprisal for some sort of unspecified political infraction.  (Summaries of the film's plot suggest that she offended authorities by seeking an exit visa to the West; this wasn't clear to me from the movie although there is one scene in which Barbara sarcastically asks a fellow doctor if he's unwilling to emigrate because "the workers and farmers of the Republic subsidized your education.")  It seems as if she has been incarcerated briefly and she is subject to constant, humiliating harassment by the local authorities -- her house is repeatedly searched and she has to submit to full body and cavity searches conducted by one of her colleagues at the hospital, ostentatiously drawing on surgical gloves.  Unlike other doctors, she doesn't have a car and has to take the bus to work.  She rides a bike sometimes, but it is vandalized by those who are continuously watching her.  Her chief nemesis is a saturnine, bland and inscrutable Stasi officer who bears a striking resemblance to Vladimir Putin.  The scrutiny to which she is subjected has a good basis:  Barbara is, indeed, plotting to flee the DDR; she has a West German lover (apparently some kind of traveling salesman or diplomatic attache) and he has smuggled into the country of wad of western cash that she plans to use to pay a coyote to take her across the border and, ultimately, to Copenhagen.  

Barbara is an impressive figure, fantastically smart and effective as a doctor, skinny as a fashion model, but with big breasts -- obviously, a highly desirable woman.  She is also stand-offish, keeps to herself, and seems to despise her fellow workers at the Clinic.  Dr. Reisser, a young physician who is her contemporary, likes her and tries, a bit too hard, to impress her.  It's clear that Wolff would like to make her his girlfriend, although she rebuffs him and keeps him at a distance.  A young girl who is confined in a work camp, called a "Socialist Extermination camp", has escaped, bedded down with ticks in the woods, and, thereby, acquired spinal meningitis.  Reisser thinks the girl is malingering -- he's been in cahoots with the Stasi cop who has warned him to beware of Barbara.  Barbara makes the proper diagnosis, saves the girl, and discovers that she is pregnant.  The girl recovers sufficiently to be returned to the labor camp where we see her working under 'chain-gang' circumstances, using a pitchfork to shovel gunk out of a drainage ditch.  When the guards are distracted, the girl (Stella) escapes again into the woods.  Meanwhile, Barbara and Dr. Reisser have been caring for a boy who was severely injured in a suicide attempt -- he flung himself down onto pavement from a third-story window when rejected by his girlfriend.  The boy seems to be doing well, but Barbara diagnoses a progressive and deteriorative brain injury -- the boy is unable to develop any emotional reaction to anything.  (This aspect of the film has an allegorical quality -- life in the DDR seems to dampen people's emotions and make them incapable of normal human responses.) Immediate surgery is required and Barbara is conscripted to manage the anesthesia during this undertaking.  But there is a problem -- Barbara's West German contacts are planning to spirit her out of the DDR at the same time the surgery is scheduled.  She has met with her boyfriend in a local hotel and everything is in readiness for her to escape..

What follows are spoilers and, if you intend to see this movie, you should skip this paragraph.  There's not much plot to Barbara although the narrative that is presented is very suspenseful.  And the way that things work out is surprising.  Stella seeks refuge with Barbara.  She is injured and, probably, will be murdered if she has to return to Torgau, the labor camp -- and she has decided to keep her child which will lead to further misery if she survives.  Barbara doesn't attend the surgery involving the injured teenager -- Dr. Wolff has to use a nurse to administer the anesthesia.  Instead, Barbara goes to the beach and assists Stella in fleeing via a fragile-looking rubber raft.  She pays her nest-egg of Western cash to the coyote who departs with the girl in heavy seas.  Dr. Reisser thinks she has fled to the West.  The Stasi captain puts out a dragnet for her.  But Barbara appears at the hospital where Reisser is keeping vigil next to the bedside of young man.  They exchange embarrassed glances and the film ends.  

I've seen several of Petzold's films (Phoenix from 2014 and Transit released in 2018) and, in my view Barbara is considerably better than those two pictures, although, perhaps, has a more limited appeal based on its somewhat abstruse subject-matter.  Petzold's direction is extremely subtle in this film and he makes almost all narrative points by indirection.  The bases for decisions are merely implied and the viewer has to work out what motivates characters.  The bucolic Brandenberg setting for the film, a small town full of brick Prussian garrison-style buildings and set on a windy moor, is memorable and persuasive -- indeed, the gale-force winds in the woods and heath is a character in itself and lends a sort of Wuthering Heights intensity to the action.  Dr. Reisser never expresses his romantic interest in Barbara in any direct way -- his feelings are implied.  Apparently peripheral sequences suggest complicated emotional responses to things.  In one scene, Barbara is in bed with her West German lover, a man that she seems to genuinely desire.  They hear his colleague and a girl that he has picked-up making love in the next room -- East German hotels have paper-thin walls.  The girl is obviously faking orgasm after orgasm and Barbara says bleakly:  "She must really want to get into West Germany".  Later, after the salesman has gone down to the bar, the young woman comes through door from the adjoining room and she looks surprisingly like Barbara.  The girl is naively certain that her boyfriend will marry her so that she can move to West Germany.  "Will they let me go?" the girl asks Barbara.  "No," Barbara says.  This scene seems beside the point, but, I think, it is intended to provide Barbara with a basis for re-evaluating her relationship with her West German boyfriend -- does she really love the man or is she just cynically using him to finagle her way out the DDR?  This is a question that she seems never to have considered herself.  In another crucial scene, Barbara finds that Dr. Reisser is treating the Stasi captain's wife, a middle-aged woman who is dying painfully of cancer.  This treatment is clearly irregular and, presumably, Dr. Reisser is getting some kind of favor for providing this service to the cop.  At least, this is what Barbara presumes and she asks him insultingly:  "Do you always take care of ass-holes?"  Dr. Reisser answers simply:  "Yes, when they're sick."  This response, I think, triggers Barbara's decisions at the film's climax.  (Dr. Reisser has a library of books about doctors, including tales by Turgenev -- one of those stories also contributes to Barbara's decision to remain working as a physician in the provincial town.  Throughout the film, literary works are referenced -- Barbara reads The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the rebellious Stella when she is hospitalized.)  The East German regime is capable of protracted deadly savagery --- but it also humiliates its enemies by giving them dingy apartments with shorts in the electrical circuits.  The regime can murder you or just harass you by providing a piano that is horribly out-of-tune -- Barbara is shown to be interested in classical music and, in fact, a good pianist.  The spectrum of abuse runs from murder to fantastically petty minor harassment.  

Petzold's film technique is very restrained and classical -- it's "invisible" film making that delivers it's effect subliminally.  Petzold uses a very narrow focal plane so that only the character important to the scene or the shot is exactly in focus.  You have to train your eye to see these effects because they pass quickly -- but the effect is that the movie is completely lucid from a pictorial perspective.  Petzold saves his big effects for important scenes.  When Barbara goes through the wind and night to the beach, the camera tracks along her beautiful profile as she rides her bicycle -- her face is bathed in silvery, unnatural light (it almost looks like day-for-night) and the effect is like an animated engraving.  It's a startling image and precisely calibrated to the emotions underlying the scene.  Barbara is powerful and haunting.