Germany
continues to pick away at its own past, though Christian Petzold’s new drama Barbara does so in a markedly hushed and
subcutaneous manner. We’re returned here to the 1980s: Nina Hoss’s frosty
doctor has been relocated from Berlin to a leafy spot on the East German coast,
and placed under state surveillance. Diagnosed as “separate” by her clubbable
colleague (Ronald Zehrfeld), she pedals her bicycle, her one remaining source
of freedom, through the countryside. Yet we sense this independence cannot last
long. For Barbara isn’t separate, but increasingly connected – with patients,
colleagues, loved ones. Those summery bike jaunts, for example, reunite her
with a lover smuggled in from the West.
Petzold
pulls his narrative together subtly and persuasively. The suspicious,
quasi-romantic dance the two doctors perform, each wondering how far they might
trust the other, feeds into a wider medical drama, where the fates of their patients
– a pregnant runaway threatened with the workhouse, an attempted suicide
seemingly betrayed by his friends – seem to map out what might lie in wait for
these professionals. Borders here take numerous forms, all equally permeable.
Barbara trysts with her lover in a hotel with paper-thin walls, where she will
have her professional identity called into question; twice in the film we see
her being probed by someone else wearing latex gloves.
In
resisting melodrama, Petzold’s film may be too clinical to rival The Lives of Others’ crossover success.
Though Barbara is stalked by men in cars, the conflicts here are mostly
internalised: what we see is how hard it was for these doctors to look out for
their charges, when they had to keep one eye out for themselves. As Hoss’s
skilfully self-contained performance warms up, so too does the film, but Barbara intends us to feel the chill of
that quiet tyranny exercised by the state, which forced its citizens to scuttle
around, conscious of their every word and move. The quietness of Petzold’s film
is both deliberate, and as pointed as a syringe: its tension derives from an
understanding any noise, at any moment, could give these individuals away.
Barbara opens in selected cinemas from today.
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