Christian Petzold’s latest thriller is set in 1980 in the ‘bad old days’ of East Germany when everybody was totally paranoid as seemingly everyone was being watched. Even the watchers themselves. Barbara, a real cold fish, is a Doctor who has been banished from Berlin for some unspecified misdemeanor and forced by the Authorities to work in a hospital in an isolated small town in the Provinces.
She is allocated a depressing dingy apartment and is constantly visited at all hours by the Stasi Secret Police who search it, and her, without apparent cause. And it turns out in this slow pot-boiling story that Andre the affable Doctor she works with and is regularly hitting on her (without success) is also on the Stasi’s payroll and also spying on her.
Barbara is sour faced and petulant … ‘if she were 6 years old, we would call her sulky’ her watcher remarks, and whilst she obvious cares for her patients, you can spot her each day sitting outside the hospital waiting for her shift to start adamantly refusing to do even an extra five minutes. She refuses to sit next to her colleagues in the cafeteria at lunchtime, but typical of this intriguing story, this could be for one of many different reasons that we are never really sure of.
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There is also a fair bit of mystery to fathom as we see Barbara making surreptitious trips on the tram and on her bike collecting and hiding large wads of money in the countryside in the beginning, clues that will eventually be solved in the end. The only time she ever seems to smile, or actually come alive, is when she has a rare clandestine liaison with her old boyfriend and after making love they continue to discuss the plan for her to escape and join him in the West.
At the same time Barbara bonds with Stella a young girl who is dragged screaming into hospital by Guards, and she is the only one to recognize that Stella is suffering from meningitis. She has escaped from a nearby Work Camp where she has been detained, and to where she will be sent back to her life of hard labour once she is cured … if not before. When she escapes for the second time and turns up unannounced on Barbara’s doorstep, it means an unexpected twist to her plans.
This totally absorbing movie where it seems on the surface not a lot is happening is a wonderful character study of this fascinating austere loner of a woman who’s past (and future) is a total mystery. She says very little even when being questioned, but we gradually learn through her gestures and her manner what she is about. It’s a stunning performance from Nina Hoss, who is reunited with writer/director Petzold again, and the result is even more spellbinding than the excellent ‘Yella’ they made in 2007.
It was deservedly Germany’s official nomination for Best Foreign Picture Oscar and although it sadly didnt make the short list in an excellent field this year, it is way up there amongst the best of the crop.
