A slow, moody transition to reunification
Christian Petzold’s Barbara is a masterly study in individual and collective entrapment
An eerie sense of permanent surveillance pervades German filmmaker Christian Petzold’s Barbara (2012) from the first frame to the last, starting with the masterly shot scene in which we see, from a distance, Barbara (Nina Hoss) sitting in a clinic’s garden, smoking to while away the minutes before her shift starts. Detachment is the only survival tool Barbara has left after brief incarceration for (we learn later) plotting against a vigilante state. Maybe her only crime was to apply for a visa to travel west, for this is East Berlin and the year is 1980, when countries behind the Iron Curtain lived in isolation from the western world and controlled the widespread malaise and uneasyness by closely monitoring their citizens’ lives, work, relationships and ideas.
As shown in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 The Lives of Others, the job of spying on other people’s lives may become a pathological obsession to the point of obliterating one’s own empty life and filling it with the remnants of other people’s activities.
Petzold’s Barbara, winner of the 2012 Silver Bear for Best Director and getting a belated première in Argentina, closely mirrors East Germany’s suffocating atmosphere under the Communist régime, when members of the same society divided themselves between “us” and “them,” “us” standing, of course, for the ones regarding themselves as part of the same side of the divide, and “them” for their adversaries, the allies (victims themselves, too) of a system that equalled civil obedience and oppression with social equality.
In the first half of Barbara, we watch the lead character — a female medical doctor banished to a small-town hospital for some misdemeanour — through the eyes of others. In the opening scene, it’s the hospital director giving Dr. André Reiser (Ronald Zehrfeld) the lowdown on every detail of the newly arrived Barbara, so sullen and detached that the two men, watching from behind the curtains in the safety of their office, refer to her as “that woman who, if she were six, we’d call sultry” for her introspective behaviour.
Like every citizen in a society in which non-conformists are deemed enemies of the state, Barbara is the subject of close monitoring and surveillance, of regular raids of her humble lodgings, of humiliating physical scrutiny in search of potentially dangerous weapons or tools. If only they could, they would perform a brainscan on her to eradicate any possibility of hazardous behaviour — that is, anything running contrary to the state’s tight lid on people’s bodies and minds. But Barbara knows well that detachment is the key to survival, that anyone is a potential spy willing to report on any suspicious movement. Barbara won’t budge, not even after her boss, André, warns her that she ought to mingle and blend in with her fellow workers.
Astutely enough, director Petzold’s Barbara starts out as a thriller, throwing random hints here and there and providing snippets of Barbara’s few moments to herself, when she secretly receives and keeps bank notes in water-proof packages which she then stashes in a chimney. We are also privy to her scattered moments of physical contact and amorous frolicking with her lover, Jörg (Mark Waschkea), a West Berliner with whom she has made plans to seek refuge in the West.
Although the film’s focus is on Barbara, Petzold’s mastery of human nature and social mores allows him to expose the overall sense of frustration and existential malaise plaguing everyone in 1980s West Germany, where people are forced to fake a convivial attitude while clandestinely harbouring guilty feelings of self-hatred that manifest themselves as cruelty toward others who are also trapped in a cage with no prospect of ever getting out.
It is not until the first 40 minutes or so of Barbara that we move from cold thriller to heart-rending melodrama, when Barbara is split not so much between the easier choice between East and West, but rather between the more personal and searing prospect of sacrificing her own happiness for the sake of someone else, someone she has no moral obligations for.
The thrilling game of watching a fugitive try to make it unscathed to the other side now gone, Barbara, the film, switches with surprising ease from panscan to the seemingly inscrutable thoughts of a brooding heroine moving against a greyish land and seascape that reflects and stands for Barbara’s and a whole society’s feelings of angst, pain and distress.
Shifting from individual to collective agony, Barbara, with a fabulous performance from the multifaceted Nina Hoss and a tight screenplay and direction by Christian Petzold, inches closer to moving empathy and admirable artistry during every minute of its 105-minute runtime.
