Barbara

Barbara

source: Barbara

It will be difficult to understand for anyone not familiar with the "Stasi" problem in the former DDR, so I really recommend to non natives to do a little research before watching this. It is a portrait of a a physician (Nina Hoss) who had a disciplinary transfer from an university clinc OstBerlin/ DDR to a small hospital somewhere on the countryside. There she is still being spied on by the Stasi. The chief physician of the hospital likes her but is constantly rejected because she fears he is also a collaborator. The movie gave me a real good feeling under which oppression intellectuals must have suffered in the Stasi era, especially how this constant climate of mistrust negatively influenced their ability to building normal relationships to any other/new people. Acting by main actors, scenery and screenplay are excellent. To me in general most movies from Germany are very uninspiring, this country could do so much better, But this one is outstanding, one of the best things coming from there in the last years. 9/10 only for the little bit unrealistic ending (which I will not reveal of course)

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.

In the semi-darkness of 1980 East Germany, it's cold and dangerous. No more so than if you want to travel to freedom, as the titular doctor of Barbara (Nina Hoss) wishes to do. Except that her visa application ended her up in the provinces, a long way from her elite hospital in Berlin. The tension in this intelligently-paced, smartly European character study * thriller is palpable as Stasi agents stalk the doctor, searching relentlessly for the money she must have to plan her defection. Freedom becomes the leitmotif touching each plot point, whether it is her growing affection for her colleague, Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), her passion for her West German lover, Jorg (Mark Waschke), or her humane love for her patients, especially her pregnant meningitis waif, Stella (Jasna Fritzi Bauer), whom she saves and protects. Director Christian Petzold (whose family fled the German Democratic Republic) fashions a mise en scene uncluttered with people or objects, like the immaculate hospital itself. Even the film's pace is measured, at times almost listless. It's as if life has been pared down to its essential living or dying. Nowhere is this sparseness more on display than in Dr. Barbara herself, a model of smug efficiency and secret longings, riding a bicycle to work like a schoolgirl who knows much more than she is giving out. Hanks Fromm's camera offers color and vibrancy during these times, a relief from the gloomy confines of her apartment. Her paranoia about everyone she works with, including Dr. Andre, partially creates this aura of self-centeredness more than the "Berlin" pride that others see. The road she takes to work is lined with trees that blow ferociously with the ever present wind, like the ominous presence of local Stasi officer Klaus (Rainer Bock), who lets her know by random searches of her apartment and person that she will not escape. Her plans to go to Denmark form the action center of the film that in the end is really about the heart that beats under repression and the love that grows out of seemingly impossible freedom. That big Wall did come down, I recall!

Barbara (**½) In a snail pace of a film, Christian Petzold's Barbara, Germany's official submission for Foreign Language Film, is a character focused picture showcasing a star-making turn by Nina Hoss. Petzold's story about a woman who's exiled to a small village in Germany doesn't offer the key details for the audience to understand our main character's motivation. Hoss commits to Barbara in a method that can only be praised. It's an authentic and pure talent-full performance by a gifted actress. Accompanying her in the role of André is Ronald Dehrfeld, another talented actor who chugs the audience through this long-winded tale. Petzold does capture glimpses of greatness but with a story that at times seems like it's going nowhere, and worst of all its 105 minutes and feels like 185. Not one of the stand-out contenders this year I'm sure. Read more reviews at The Awards Circuit: (http://www.awardscircuit.com)

Christian Petzold was born in 1960 so it's not a given that he is familiar with Jacques Prevert's poem 'Barbara' (which was subsequently set to music and recorded by Yves Montand amongst others) despite the esteem in which it is held - for many years (and possibly even today for all I know- every school child in France was required to learn it by heart. I bring it up because Prevert's poem was anti-war, specifically the second World War and by extension Germany and Petzold's Barbara is anti-East Germany for roughly the forty years when it was under Communist rule. The film is held together by Nina Hoss who is more than up to the task of carrying a film single-handed. She plays a doctor exiled from Berlin to a one-stethoscope town in North Germany where she is harassed and humiliated by the Stasi because she has a lover in Western Germany and clearly has eyes to follow him. If that were all it would be a case of so what but she is also a dedicated and humane doctor and more than half of her wants to stay where she is and do something worthwhile. About two thirds of the way through it occurred to me I was unaware of any background music - I checked the credits on IMDb and there is a 'music' credit so either I was so engrossed in the film - and it's deliberately 'measured' pace tends to draw you in - that I didn't hear such music as was there or else it was edited out. Only once was I a tad disappointed by sloppy writing - one of Barbara's patients, who has grown attached to Barbara, has been brutally removed from hospital as soon as she is well enough, presumably never to be heard of again. Towards the end of the film this patient appears at Barbara's door yet clearly she could have had no idea where the doctor's private flat was. Though I registered this immediately (I see a lot of films, sue me) it failed to mar my enjoyment of an excellent effort.

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.

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.