Film Review: Barbara

Barbara is a deeply affecting and realistic portrait of life in 1980s East Germany. In his latest film, writer-director Christian Petzold delivers a fine-tuned effort that earned him the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Petzold was born in West Germany and originally went to university for Literature and Drama. After graduating he attended Berlin’s German Academy for TV and Film where he became acquainted with a generation of underground filmmakers now known as the Berlin School. He has been at the vanguard of this independent cinema movement ever since winning widespread acclaim for his 2000 film The State I Am In. Like most directors of the Berlin School, Petzold creates ambitious narrative frameworks deeply rooted in the period of German history that he sets out to encapsulate.

This approach is especially evident in Barbara, the story of an eponymous doctor (Nina Hoss) who is banished from her prestigious Berlin hospital to a clinic in the East German countryside after applying for an exit visa to the West. There she meets fellow doctor André (Ronald Zehrfeld) who tries to establish a connection in spite of her frigid demeanor.

The film’s screenplay and its cinematic execution are impressively tight. Petzold doesn’t waste a scene establishing his protagonists within the atmosphere of soul-crushing paranoia that pervaded East Germany in the ’80s. Suspicion, desperation, routine searches and friendly cavity checks by the Stasi are the main features of Barbara’s world.

The only non-diegetic sound comes at the beginning of the film—a folk ballad bleeding over from the opening credits that is abruptly cut once Barbara’s bus arrives at her bleak new place of work. From then on, silence reigns. Petzold does wonders with correctly dictating actors’ facial expressions to reveal their inner thoughts, making what is withheld during their interactions as important as what is explicitly stated.

Barbara’s story is told in recurring settings like cars, buses, the countryside and the clinic that have similar framing throughout, forging a sense of uneasy routine. This formal choice also creates an aura of suspense, heightened by static and well-composed shots with a precise gaze that is perpetually focused on the protagonists.

Petzold crafts a well-wrought character study that elucidates everyday life under an oppressive political climate. Barbara retains its poignancy without sensationalizing the title character’s struggles. She is painted in a warm and humanistic light that draws in the viewer and cuts through the bleakness of her existence, ultimately revealing a glimmer of redemptive hope.