Barbara

Nina Hoss in Barbara

Christian Petzold's Barbara didn't quite shake me to my core like his Phoenix did, but still marks him as one of the more interesting current filmmakers. Starring, as in Phoenix, Nina Hoss and Ronald Zehrfeld, the film tells the tale of an East German doctor exiled to a rustic hospital because of her attempt to defect. She has a West German lover and seems poised to escape to him when fate and a hunky doc played by Herr Zehrfeld intervene.

The film is in a more realistic and objective mode than Phoenix which is more subjective and poetic. Petzold depicts the paranoia of living in a police state, but never caricatures the Party's enforcers. Likewise, Barbara herself is portrayed as prickly and ambivalent. Petzold gives his actors room to make their portrayals three dimensional. These are not heroes and villains, but people muddling along, each with their own reasons. When Hoss and Zehrfeld discuss the use of perspective in Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson..., Petzold is commenting on his own attempt to offer multiple perspectives on the defunct workers paradise.

Barbara ends with an act of sublime self-sacrifice. A heroic ending to a tale that refuses to romanticize its heroine or her plight. (10/5/16)