email print share on Facebook share on Twitter share on LinkedIn share on reddit pin on Pinterest

FILMS / REVIEWS

Barbara

by 

- A subtle dive into a paranoid East Germany at the beginning of the 1980s. A doctor suspected of wanting to cross over the border. Silver Bear for the Best Director at the Berlinale 2012.

With Barbara [+see also:
trailer
interview: Christian Petzold
film profile
]
, screened as part of the competition in Berlin, German director Christian Petzold explores his common theme of duplicity in a new way.

The historical film portrays with great precision the atmosphere of the German Democratic Republic in 1980, and the daily tension of Eastern Germans peparing an escape. The eponymous heroine, interpreted by the always elegant Nina Hoss, is a female doctor from Berlin who is transferred to a hospital in a small town after she applies for a visa to West Germany, where her lover Jörg (Mark Waschke) lives.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

Because she is closely watched by state security and devulges absolutely nothing about herself, she lives in gloomy isolation, only bearable because she is so indifferent about a life that she cannot wait to leave. She performs her work with passion, but develops a strange relationship of complicity and defiance with her supervisor Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), although she knows that he might be watching her, especially as the latter knows the state security agent who keeps turning up at her house with his female colleague who wears latex gloves.

With his famous meticulous attention to detail, in the film’s setting, its objects, and its characters, Petzold lets us observe the ramifications of Barbara’s resolution, the difficulty to lie, her doubts. When Jörg, with whom we realise that she isn’t exactly herself either, tells her of a good time to cross into West Germany, she replies without hesitating that she will be on call at the hospital!

The film is undeniably of high quality. However, knowing Petzold’s talent in superimposing levels of reality to atteign great psychological veracity, and knowing Hoss’ talent in playing characters between reality, projections, and fantasies (as she did for Petzold in the superb Yella [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
), one cannot help but be disturbed by the story’s linearity. One can however easily imagine that, for the East Germans who found themselves in Barbara’s situation, the film hits the nail on the head.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

(Translated from French)

Did you enjoy reading this article? Please subscribe to our newsletter to receive more stories like this directly in your inbox.

Privacy Policy