Barbara
A city doctor falls under the Stasi’s thumb in East Germany.
DIRECTED BY CHRISTIAN PETZOLD
Between Argo, Skyfall, and Zero Dark Thirty, spies have had a pretty good year in the movies. Generally, they come across as unsung guardians. Their winning streak ends in Christian Petzold’s stunning Barbara, a taut portrait of Stasi-dominated East Berlin in 1980. Unlike Skyfall’s superhuman spooks and Argo’s lovable tricksters, Barbara’s spies are the dumpy-looking people next door—representatives of a culture of surveillance so insidious that even the shifty-eyed landlady seems capable of unspeakable horrors in the name of the state.
Petzold’s frequent collaborator Nina Hoss plays the title character, an East German physician banished to the countryside for requesting a permit to leave the country so she can join her paramour in West Germany. Barbara is hard to read, and the film gets a lot of mileage out of Hoss’s inscrutable face and brusque delivery. We’re not sure at first if she’s simply a haughty, cultured city doctor unaccustomed to the provincial surroundings she’d just as soon leave, or a guarded person, protecting herself against the probing eyes of strangers who would be all too happy to write her up for any behavioural infractions.
That we never really figure out what drives Barbara, even as we see her kindness toward patients in equally tough positions, is a testament both to Hoss’s terrific performance and Petzold’s firm grip on the material. Without firing a single bullet, Petzold has crafted as suspenseful a film as any this year—a thriller based on sharp sound cues, furtive glances, and rich characters who keep their motivations close to their chests.