Barbara

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!

This brilliant German film explores two fundamental questions: whether it is possible to collaborate with a fundamentally oppressive state, and the acute degree of personal loneliness felt by those who cannot, and whom the state thereby treats as its enemies. The mundane depersonalisation of life under the Stasi is captured much more acutely, it seems to me, in this story than in the more acclaimed 'The Lives of Others'; that the leading collaborator is arguably a decent and attractive person, albeit one who has made different choices to the admirable but not wholly likable heroine, adds subtlety and humanity to the overall portrait of society. Both protagonists are excellent in their roles; the camera-work captures the underlying feelings of alienation in a way that reminded me of early Kieslowski. 'Barbara' is by turns bleak, poetic, emotional and thought-provoking: it deserves to be more widely known.

Barbara (2012)

A somber, tightly scripted, almost old-fashioned film. I can picture this in black white, or a movie not only set in 1980 but shot then, too. I mean this all as a compliment.

It's key to know that this is Communist East Germany, a closed country under Soviet influence and generally struggling to keep up with West Germany. The doldrums depicted, and the lower quality of medical care at this small provincial clinic, are very real.

The title character is a downtrodden doctor who was caught trying to escape to the West, and was sent to the boondocks as punishment. And she is periodically searched by the authorities, who go through her apartment, her body cavities, her entire personal life while she passively waits. It's awful. And very real.

There is a steady vague story line showing Barbara's contacts to sympathetic Germans, and it seems one or two of them are visiting now and then from the West. Clandestine meetings with money (and sex) continue in the woods, but these are minor points in her steady work as a doctor in the clinic.

More important, it turns out, is the cute and steady-handed male doctor who runs the clinic. She doesn't trust him. If he asks questions out of curiosity she isn't sure if he's a spy or just a nice guy. We aren't sure either. His life is simple and has simple pleasures, and he likes her and tries to make her open up and actually smile, which turns out to be the hardest thing in the whole movie.

Barbara's plans to escape seem to be threatened by her job commitment, which she can't shirk because it'll draw attention to her irregularities. And so things go in this windy, North German countryside. It's so beautifully, patiently wrought, you have to watch and wait, just as passively as Barbara. It's sad, for sure, and yet there are these small glimmers. For one thing, there is the idea that no matter what your circumstances there is always the ability to be good and to do good. The male doctor is the example of this, and Barbara begins to see something more genuine at work than her own superficial (we assume) strivings for a consumerist West.

It's odd to see such a balanced and yet truthful view of Communist Germany. The oppression is real and bad, but the strivings of regular people (doctors and others) make hope possible. I loved this movie, even though fairly little happens, and there are few turns of the plot that are clearly for dramatic impact more than an integral building of character. But these are small caveats. The total effect is simple and penetrating, with a beautiful ending.

"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.

It's 1980 East Germany. Dr Barbara Wolff (Nina Hoss) is new in the backwaters hospital. She has isolated herself from all her colleagues. The secret police Stasi is keeping track of her for applying for an exit visa and she lost her job at a prestigious hospital in East Berlin. She can trust nobody even the chief doctor Reiser. There is a patient named Stella that has developed an attachment to Barbara. She is pregnant and is desperate to flee to the West.

I love the idea of this story. This should be a tense thriller of paranoia and fear. Instead this is slow moving, reserved emotionally and quiet. The long takes, medium shots, and the stoic performances strip the movie of its tension. The fact that she is holding her feelings so tightly may be fitting for the story. It doesn't always allow people to feel her fears. It's a specific way to do this story and it works on that level.