"Barbara" is set in the East Germany of 1980. The title character is a young doctor who has fallen foul of the authorities because she has made an official request to emigrate to the West to be with her West German lover. Making such a request was not, officially, illegal, but it has earned Barbara the suspicion of the authorities. She has lost her job at a prestigious Berlin hospital and has been transferred to a small rural hospital near the Baltic coast. She is kept under regular surveillance and is subjected to regular searches by the Stasi, the East German secret police. Although the Stasi never find any evidence, Barbara is secretly making plans to escape to the West with the help of her lover Jörg.
The two other main characters are Barbara's boss Doctor André Reiser and a young girl named Stella, a patient at the hospital. Although Reiser seems friendly, he makes little secret of the fact that he is an informer for the Stasi. (He claims to have been blackmailed into accepting the role, but Barbara doubts the truth of his story). Like Barbara, Stella has committed no actual crime, but is nevertheless fallen foul of the authorities, who regard her as having an anti-social attitude, and she has been incarcerated in a labour camp for "re-education". (Communist Newspeak for "punishment when you haven't actually done anything to be punished for"). It is hardly surprising that Stella loathes everything about East Germany and is even more desperate to escape than Barbara.
1980 was less than a decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall, but at the time the East German regime, like Communist regimes all over Eastern Europe, seemed as secure as ever. Whatever revolutionary idealism the regime had once possessed had long since evaporated as Communism evolved into what George Orwell described in "1984" as "oligarchical collectivism", a strongly hierarchical system where those at the top of the pecking order used their position to secure privileges and material advantages for themselves, and protected their position by repression and the use of the ever-present Stasi to root out dissent.
As another reviewer has written, Barbara as played by Nina Hoss is admirable but not wholly likeable. There is something cold and aloof about her, as though her experiences have taught her not to trust anyone. The use of the Christian name Barbara, which literally means "strange, foreign", may have been deliberate, as she is very much an outsider in her society. Even with Jörg we wonder if her feelings for him are rooted in love or in a desire to escape the system. Only with her fellow dissident Stella does she seem to unwind and be herself. André, who as a tool of the oppressive system is far from admirable, paradoxically seems warmer and more human, although Barbara keeps her distance from him. It is notable that she always addresses him with the formal "Sie" rather than the more intimate "du". This is a point of German linguistic etiquette which will probably lost on English-speaking viewers who can only understand the subtitles, but the implication is that she does not wish to get close to him. The more admirable side of Barbara's character becomes clear when, at the end of the movie, she makes a startling decision. Both Hoss and Ronald Zehrfeld as André play their parts very well.
Over the last few decades, the German cinema has made sterling efforts to come to terms with the legacy of the country's Nazi past. Christian Petzold's film can be seen as part of an attempt to come to terms with another, and more recent, dark side of the nation's history. The film is not an easy one to watch, as it captures the atmosphere of fear, suspicion and paranoia which afflicts all those who have the misfortune to live under a totalitarian system, as well as the bleak shabbiness of Eastern Europe before the Wall came down. Yet it well repays the effort of watching it. 7/10.
The two other main characters are Barbara's boss Doctor André Reiser and a young girl named Stella, a patient at the hospital. Although Reiser seems friendly, he makes little secret of the fact that he is an informer for the Stasi. (He claims to have been blackmailed into accepting the role, but Barbara doubts the truth of his story). Like Barbara, Stella has committed no actual crime, but is nevertheless fallen foul of the authorities, who regard her as having an anti-social attitude, and she has been incarcerated in a labour camp for "re-education". (Communist Newspeak for "punishment when you haven't actually done anything to be punished for"). It is hardly surprising that Stella loathes everything about East Germany and is even more desperate to escape than Barbara.
1980 was less than a decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall, but at the time the East German regime, like Communist regimes all over Eastern Europe, seemed as secure as ever. Whatever revolutionary idealism the regime had once possessed had long since evaporated as Communism evolved into what George Orwell described in "1984" as "oligarchical collectivism", a strongly hierarchical system where those at the top of the pecking order used their position to secure privileges and material advantages for themselves, and protected their position by repression and the use of the ever-present Stasi to root out dissent.
As another reviewer has written, Barbara as played by Nina Hoss is admirable but not wholly likeable. There is something cold and aloof about her, as though her experiences have taught her not to trust anyone. The use of the Christian name Barbara, which literally means "strange, foreign", may have been deliberate, as she is very much an outsider in her society. Even with Jörg we wonder if her feelings for him are rooted in love or in a desire to escape the system. Only with her fellow dissident Stella does she seem to unwind and be herself. André, who as a tool of the oppressive system is far from admirable, paradoxically seems warmer and more human, although Barbara keeps her distance from him. It is notable that she always addresses him with the formal "Sie" rather than the more intimate "du". This is a point of German linguistic etiquette which will probably lost on English-speaking viewers who can only understand the subtitles, but the implication is that she does not wish to get close to him. The more admirable side of Barbara's character becomes clear when, at the end of the movie, she makes a startling decision. Both Hoss and Ronald Zehrfeld as André play their parts very well.
Over the last few decades, the German cinema has made sterling efforts to come to terms with the legacy of the country's Nazi past. Christian Petzold's film can be seen as part of an attempt to come to terms with another, and more recent, dark side of the nation's history. The film is not an easy one to watch, as it captures the atmosphere of fear, suspicion and paranoia which afflicts all those who have the misfortune to live under a totalitarian system, as well as the bleak shabbiness of Eastern Europe before the Wall came down. Yet it well repays the effort of watching it. 7/10.