If the Academy Awards were ever to set out to encompass a truly international scope, a performance like that of Nina Hoss in the accomplished German film, Barbara, would not go unheeded. She is marvelous as Barbara, a banished physician who finds herself in a boondocks East German town at a time before the Iron Curtain fell. Her crime? Attempting to flee across the border from the oppressive regime into West Germany.
We encounter her as she begins to work in a hospital–all the while under surveillance from a Stasi heavy, Klaus Schultz (Rainer Bock). She keeps her distance from the other employees, refusing to even to eat with them in the cafeteria. The head physician, Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), takes an interest in her. Or so it seems…
…Barbara is an impeccably paced study of the microcosm of a few characters in a small, out of the way town and how they represent the macrocosm of a society hellbent on inducing paranoia and suspicion as tools of control. Every move made by Andre can be read as either a generous forthcoming or a deceiving surveillance. He appears so legitimate it almost seems Barbara unreasonably suspects him. Then Schultz’ guys show up to not only search her place but her body cavities. The high-strung Barbara gives in to Andre’s advances in glacial steps. Hoss’s performance marvels the most in her nonverbals. She’s the master of a glance, even a twitch.
Patients in the hospital occasionally cry out in bursts of grief, piercing through the sterile stillness that director Christian Petzold, so effectively maintains. Relationships change and a thriller of sorts begins to develop. It give nothing away that moral compromise is one of the themes here. As it was so wonderfully explored in the more straightforward The Lives Of Others, Barbara gives an equally relevant payoff while taking a different tack. It moves forward with subtlety and its suspense is more of the quiet variety. Yet the dilemmas it presents are no more timeworn than that of freedom itself.
4 Gripping and Riveting Iron Curtains That Unveil A Great Performance (out of 5)
Barbara is playing this week at the Ritz V