At SIFF Cinema, “Barbara” Looks East and West in Longing

Christian Petzold, the writer/director of Barbara (screening at SIFF Cinema Uptown through January 3), metes out crucial information slowly over the film’s 105 minutes. This, in conjunction with his disinterest in exposition for foreign audiences, means the U.S. viewer who hasn’t already met, say, the Stasi in The Lives of Others may be getting more gist than nuance.

So without giving too much of the story away — since the pace of its unfolding is part of its spell — let me mention a few things. It’s set in 1980, in the German Democratic Republic.

You had an East Berlin and a West Berlin, in those days. While the GDR was a socialist state, it shared the paranoia of an authoritarian communist country: a secret police (the Stasi) operated a widespread network of informers. When you were hauled in, you were offered the chance to inform. (Well, “inform.” Take notes. Notice things. That’s all.)

Barbara (Nina Hoss), a doctor, finds herself in “the provinces” near the Baltic coast, north of Berlin, though she sees a patient, a young girl from Torgau. Home of a few infamous prisons where Nazis (and then the Soviet secret police) kept dissidents and other undesirables, Torgau was where the GDR ran a juvenile workhouse not very different from a prison. Before, Barbara was at the Charité, the GDR’s leading medical university, one of the best and the brightest.

Petzold knows you expect the GDR to be dour and poor and grimly watchful, but her supervisor at the pediatric hospital, Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), is an amicable, ursine fellow who seems unlikely to harm a fly. His overriding concern seems to be that Barbara fit in with his staff, get to know people; otherwise they’ll feel snubbed by the big gun from Berlin. Barbara takes to cycling up and down the countryside, and the scenery, as eyed by director of photography Hans Fromm, is lush in a northern way, yellow-brown fields of wind-blown grass, stands of fir trees.

The film poses Barbara with a clear choice, to stay or go, but Petzold ups the stakes sneaking in glimpses of how the socialist ethos was (is) a sort of challenge to be a better person, one who would humbly put service to others first. The people paid for Barbara’s first-class education, Andre reminds her; couldn’t these particular people hope to get something back? And yet there’s Torgau, and surveillance. Does that make it possible to break the agreement? Yes and no.

A large part of the enjoyment of the film comes from seeing Hoss’s face translate Barbara’s conflicting emotions. She’s one of those people whose skin lies thinly on the skull, tightened by tension or tugged down by sullenness, but her smile seems to travel ear to ear and erase a decade. Her deep-set eyes convey emotional distance and fatigue, but they soften as she reads Huckleberry Finn to her charge with meningitis. Zehrfeld’s Andre (who runs out to his herb garden when making her a ratatouille dinner — his pièce de seduction) looks imperturbable, until that shot of him waiting in a hallway for Barbara, who is never early, but never late, either.