Barbara (Nina Hoss) is a physician in a small town near the Baltic Sea. She used to work at a prestigious hospital in Berlin but was sent here as punishment for her temerity in applying for permission to leave the country. It’s 1980 and she’s in East Germany, where the right to travel may theoretically exist, but people of working age with valuable skills are just not going to be allowed to take those skills outside the country. Besides the demotion, Barbara is under surveillance and is treated to regular visits from the Stasi, who tear apart her apartment on a regular basis and subject her body to repeated cavity searches.
One bright spot in Barbara’s provincial existence is the hospital’s handsome head doctor Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), who goes out of his way to be kind to her. Of course he’s also working with the Stasi, as we see in an early scene with a GDR officer who practically exudes evil (Rainer Bock, who played the doctor in The White Ribbon). Independent of that scene, the fact that Andre is living much more comfortably than Barbara—he has a well-furnished house and a car, while she has a crummy little apartment and a bicycle—is a tipoff that he’s on good relations with the powers that be.
Barbara is well aware of Andre’s role, because she knows how things work in East Germany. However, neither she nor we really know how loyal he is to the Stasi, and nailing that down is one of the little dramas working itself out in this low-key thriller. Another plot line involves Barbara’s intention to flee the country to be with her West German boyfriend (Mark Waschke), which includes many intermediate steps like receiving Western currency surreptitiously and hiding it in preparation for her departure.
In Barbara, director Christian Petzold (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Harun Farocki) creates an intriguing portrait of life in East Germany, focusing on the distortions created in daily life when you live in a police state. Chief among these is that no one can ever be sure of any else’s motivations, creating an endemic lack of trust that turns ordinary human relations into a series of high-stakes chess matches with potential imprisonment or worse awaiting those who make a false move.
Most of the misery we see, however, is not spectacular but petty, inflicted by sad little people in ugly suits who enjoy exercising the bit of power they have in a society that runs on anti-utilitarian principles. In East Germany, it seems, the purpose of the government is not to help the population maximize pleasure and avoid pain, but to block even harmless pleasures while inflicting pain to very little purpose.
Appropriate to a film about people living under oppressive mediocrity, Petzold keeps the mood low key rather than melodramatic, employing a muted palette and a restrained soundtrack that relies primarily on diegetic music. Cinematographer Hans Fromm’s shots are beautifully composed and the camera is generally still, keeping the focus on the performances of the actors rather than directorial flourishes.
Hoss carries the film with a highly controlled performance, appropriate for a character who has learned how to survive by being very careful about showing her true feelings. Professionally, Barabara is a fine doctor who shows not only medical expertise but humanity towards her patients, particularly a young woman named Stella (Jasna Fritzi Bauer) who has escaped four times from a labor camp. When Stella shows up at the hospital, Andre thinks she is goldbricking, but Barbara quickly identifies Stella’s problem as meningitis, helps her through some painful medical tests, and reads to her as she recovers. Individual humanity can only do so much in a police state, however, and soon Stella is returned to the labor camp, where the order of the day is unnecessary, old-fashioned misery.
Barbara comes to a conclusion that was absolutely not what I was expecting, but one that seems entirely true to the characters and their environment. That’s a rare feat for a filmmaker to pull off, and while Barbara was snubbed by the Oscars, it won a number of awards internationally upon its release in 2012. | Sarah Boslaugh
Barbara is distributed on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber and is also available on several streaming services.
