Barbara

It looks like THE LIVES OF OTHERS is going to spearhead a cycle of films about victims of the East German secret police and that sounds like a good subject along the lines of the US conspiracy thrillers. This one has an interesting enough premise. Out of favor doctor Hoss (THE WHITE MASSAI) is sent to a provincial hospital, where the friendly fellow medico may be keeping a report on her. The official who keeps on calling in the lady with the rubber glove to do cavity searches certainly is.

The sub-plot of the teenage girl from the socialist work camp is strong enough but the way things are wound up is not all that convincing and tension has slacked by then.

Production values are good enough but the film lacks the feeling of time and place that would make it register.

This year's Oscar entry from Germany is an edgy political thriller set in East Germany of 80s.

Nina Hoss plays the titular role. She is a doctor from Berlin banished to work in a small hospital in the provinces as punishment for her attempts to emigrate to the West.. Despite being choked by the omnipresent & omniscient secret police - Stasi - & surrounded by people she cannot trust, Nina Hoss brilliantly personifies a defiance that is as resilient as it is understated.

The movie is almost completely devoid of any background score. But, the silences, natural sounds, even the door bell ringing & clock ticking have been used to such great effect to underline the oppressive existence.

A tour de force in film-making !

Yes, I worked in the old DDR. Living in London, and being a graduate engineer able to speak German, I was hired by a company importing machinery from the DDR to be their liaison man at the factory in East Berlin, and spent a number of lengthy periods over there in the late 60s and early 70s. I very much settled into working life there, and would socialise with the other engineers at the factory. I even had a local girlfriend for a while! I recall the mindless bureaucracy, the often petty limitations on what everyone could do, and of course the ubiquitous police presence. In order to have my car to get around during these long tours of duty, I would usually take the ferry and drive there, and on one occasion I got harangued by a cop who told me my car was too dirty and that having a dirty car was strictly forbidden in the DDR!! This movie depicts an era a decade later, and some things had changed. I remember many older people expressing considerable enthusiasm for their 'socialist utopia', largely because they felt their lives were massively better than under the Nazis and during the war years. But there was also a rising generation who wanted what people in the west had, a desire which had a particularly curious form of expression in Levi jeans! These were like gold dust, and sometimes at weekends I would pop through Checkpoint Charlie into West Berlin, and buy half a dozen pairs to give to my friends. Barbara and André were very much of that generation, Schütz was distinctly of the old guard. So for me, the movie played out against a familiar background, and the agonising personal decisions this forced upon the central characters had great reality. Both Barbara and André were portrayed very much as caring doctors, placed in intolerable situations by the heavy and unfeeling hand of the state. The movie very cleverly kept us all in the dark, as we speculated how it might end. Well worth watching to find out!

"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.

I visited Eastern Europe, Berlin, Prague, and Budapest, in March 1990. At that time, the Berlin Wall had already been fallen down, but Germany had not reunited yet.

People could freely come and go over the borders between East and West Germany. I went through Checkpoint Charlie to East Berlin, and I visited retro-future TV tower and saw Ladas running on street.

In a night train from Berlin to Prague, I asked a passenger who sat next to me if Germany would reunite in a year, and he answered that he didn't believe it would happen so early. In fact, Germany reunited in October 1990.

Although I actually visited East Berlin, now, it is hardly for me to believe that the half of Germany was a communist state just twenty-three years ago.

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"Barbara" is a German film about people living in East Germany in 1980. Barbara is a female doctor, who was watched by the secret police.

It is one of the greatest German films that I have ever seen. There is no exaggeration and omission in this film. Every element in it is necessary, and I couldn't find that any things were unnecessary.

This film is very quiet, because there is no background music. That makes audience concentrated in every tiny sound. Barbara was always nervous about the secret police, so she got surprised when the doorbell started to ring, and the audience also got really surprised with the sound of the doorbell, and fully understood her emotion.

Nina Hoss, as Barbara, was also great and attractive. She didn't overplay at all, but accurately expressed how Barbara felt in her mind. After seeing her performance, most actors and actress became to look unnatural.

This film is a quiet, simple, and elegant. If you love films, I strongly recommend you to see it.