lasttimeisaw A double-bill of contemporary Germany's leading director Christian Petzold's most recent films BARBARA and PHOENIX, both are executed with the same team and stars Nina Hoss, Petzold's longtime muse and Ronald Zehrfeld as two leads, punctiliously examine the mentality of German people in the post-WWII era.In BARBARA, the locale is a rural surrounding of 1980s East Germany, Hoss is the titular Barbara, a doctor newly banished to a small hospital due to some unexplained collusion with West Germany, Barbara's frosty bearing means she is not here to make friends, and her condition is sympathising although the hostility and vigilance between her and her colleagues is mutual, but she is also constantly under surveillance from the authority after hours, she even has to endure the humiliation of her body being manually checked each time when they launch a fine-tooth comb in her small unadorned apartment. However Barbara has her own secret, she has a West German lover Jörg (Waschke) who apparently is a rich business man and planning to rescue her from the repressive and authoritarian East Germany, Jörg even comes to visit her frequently and they engage in some uninhibited carnal knowledge. Back in the hospital, meanwhile, a palpable comradeship (or romance even) is hatching between Barbara and her fellow doctor André (Zehrfeld), who has been demoted due to a medical accident, through their medical cares towards young patients Stella (Bauer) and Mario (Schümann). When Barbara finally secures an opportunity to flee to the westernised civilisation she has been longing for all these years, a sudden change alters her entire plan and she has to make a big sacrifice to do the right thing. PHOENIX sets its story right after the WWII, Hoss is Nelly, a disfigured concentration-camp survivor who has done a facial reconstruction surgery, she decides to look for her husband Johannes (Zehrfeld), whom her friend Lene (Kunzendorf) accuses as a traitor, because it is him, who has sold Nelly out to Nazi in the first place. Nelly tracks him down in a club named "Phoenix" where the former musician Johannes works as a busboy, then comes the pulpy part, Johannes cannot recognise Nelly, his presumed dead wife, yet he offers her an opportunity to half of Nelly's inheritance if she is willing to act as his wife, and pretends that she miraculously returns from the camp so they can claim the inheritance. This premise is a tricky one, in one hand it is really far-fetched and prompts many reasonable questions of Johannes' peculiar behaviour in his plan, how can a man fails to recognise his wife although her face is altered, but I suppose not a lot (especially compared with Pedro Almodóvar's THE SKIN I LIVE IN 2011, 7/10), since Nelly wants the surgery to keep her look instead of changing into a new one. Especially when Nelly shows the exact handwriting of his wife, dubiety has never crossed his mind, not to mention to notice the number on her arm from the death camp or to do a little bit of homework to the uncannily similar impostor; on the other hand, Johannes' careless behaviour may just pinpoint his mindset at then, he refuses to believe Nelly is still alive, he is deeply ashamed of his betrayal and subconsciously he evades to face the music, like Nelly, he is also a soul tormented by war, a commoner's degradation under the extreme times. As for Nelly, viewers are easy to take side of Lene, who gets vexed and disappointed by her obstinacy of refusing accepting Johanne's perfidy, her capitulation to his ludicrous bidding and even wallows in the game, nevertheless, thanks to Hoss' coherently gripping performance (includes her magnificent rendition of SPEAK LOW in the key moment) and Petzold's sublime conceit in the coda, PHOENIX doesn't ends up like a common-or-garden revenge thriller, instead it transcends to a soul-pulverising revelation which potently justifies why film is such an important form of art for us, in that moment, it shatters all the negativity amassed before and renders audience the catharsis we are not expected to experience! By comparison, BARBARA doesn't give the same effect, and its auxiliary stories about Stella and Mario serve only as mere plot device, too cursory and generic besides Barbara's own hazardous predicament, which validly curtails the repercussion in the finale which blatantly beckons that let's just sing a tribute to Barbara's altruistic loftiness!In any rate Nina Hoss is plain great in both films, stern-looking and standoffish in BARBARA, she is a woman withdrawn to herself completely, anger, hatred, sympathy and strong sense of responsibility as a doctor, all hidden under her poker face, it is her weapon to survive in the regime, only occasionally she reveals herself during the trysts with Jörg, until she finds the same frequency with André, maybe a more suitable match for her. There is still hope in the Communist regime. Whereas in PHOENIX, she transforms herself into a perpetually petrified victim, no one can imagine what she has to suffer to be alive until this point, her sole emotional anchor is the aim to find her husband back, still she has to deal with a cruel fact which will destroy all her hope. Two vastly different character, she nails them both! Ronald Zehrfeld, the kindly-looking, robust German actor, constitutes a great co-existence with Hoss, either as a confidentiality-divulging doctor tries to woo his fellow doctor or a desperate husband too blind to accept the haunting fact that his presumably-dead wife is back to reprise her role for a second time. Also worth mentioning is Nina Kunzendorf (looks like a thinner version of Minnie Driver), her understated love towards Nelly is subtly hinted and she exits with an equally memorable impression as the disillusioned fighter cannot adapt a new life to move on after the manmade calamity.

Hot Potato At first I just enjoyed the movie and would have rated it decently. Then it ends! The movie had quite patiently laid out a plot with many questions not yet answered, in fact including the main factor indicating of what created all this woman's circumstances. The story proceeds and develops creating more questions than answers. We slowly learn a bit about each character and a deep shell they are in, but often not the cause, the Communist system they live in. Which you suspect is all just preparing you for the twist and reveal at the end of the movie, illuminating all. It seems to be unwinding and a sub plot ends, adding a few more unanswered questions, much is hanging in the air and she unexpectedly returns to work. Then it ends! -- And you wonder ???Then you realize it was not the plot the director was trying to tell, he had pulled you in with no intention of satisfying the plot. Then you think, ah yes! Character and development, they did a wonderful job of that, although they really didn't change much as you would expect in a love story, but you learned who they may be, bit by bit, as the system forced them to not expose character. They were just remote cogs in the cruel bureaucratic wheel as it turned.You figure again, maybe not, as you really only learn wee bits and pieces about them, more questions than answers, but see the deep, sharp, cold, forced personality adaptations and voids caused by the political system in those times, which we actually see little of in the movie, although much hinges on it. Maybe it's that he was trying to tell? Ah! you see it and realize you haven't enjoyed a movie that much in some time. You didn't need all the necessities. It had all it needed, including no last line. Rich.Oh yes, wherever they made this movie it was beautiful.

secondtake Barbara (2012)A somber, tightly scripted, almost old-fashioned film. I can picture this in black white, or a movie not only set in 1980 but shot then, too. I mean this all as a compliment.It's key to know that this is Communist East Germany, a closed country under Soviet influence and generally struggling to keep up with West Germany. The doldrums depicted, and the lower quality of medical care at this small provincial clinic, are very real. The title character is a downtrodden doctor who was caught trying to escape to the West, and was sent to the boondocks as punishment. And she is periodically searched by the authorities, who go through her apartment, her body cavities, her entire personal life while she passively waits. It's awful. And very real.There is a steady vague story line showing Barbara's contacts to sympathetic Germans, and it seems one or two of them are visiting now and then from the West. Clandestine meetings with money (and sex) continue in the woods, but these are minor points in her steady work as a doctor in the clinic.More important, it turns out, is the cute and steady-handed male doctor who runs the clinic. She doesn't trust him. If he asks questions out of curiosity she isn't sure if he's a spy or just a nice guy. We aren't sure either. His life is simple and has simple pleasures, and he likes her and tries to make her open up and actually smile, which turns out to be the hardest thing in the whole movie.Barbara's plans to escape seem to be threatened by her job commitment, which she can't shirk because it'll draw attention to her irregularities. And so things go in this windy, North German countryside. It's so beautifully, patiently wrought, you have to watch and wait, just as passively as Barbara. It's sad, for sure, and yet there are these small glimmers. For one thing, there is the idea that no matter what your circumstances there is always the ability to be good and to do good. The male doctor is the example of this, and Barbara begins to see something more genuine at work than her own superficial (we assume) strivings for a consumerist West.It's odd to see such a balanced and yet truthful view of Communist Germany. The oppression is real and bad, but the strivings of regular people (doctors and others) make hope possible. I loved this movie, even though fairly little happens, and there are few turns of the plot that are clearly for dramatic impact more than an integral building of character. But these are small caveats. The total effect is simple and penetrating, with a beautiful ending.

OJT The clever doctor Barbara Wolf is by the authorities placed out in the provincial parts of the Eastern German Republic, die DDR. We're in 1980, nine years before the fall of the Berlin wall and the Iron curtain. She has a lover from the free West Germany, and wants to move to the West, which is out if question for the paranoid communist government, which became famous for the surveillance techniques and spying systems. It's later revealed that 1/7th of the population was forced to spy on others, even family members, to prevent opposition, as well as getting too much contact with Western ideas and ideologies.In the province she meets another clever doctor placed in the province after a mishap pending at a Berlin hospital. Or is this just a cover up story of a spying agent? Barbara can't tell. She knows there are possible spies all over. She rightfully trusts no one. For her it's an impossible idea for her lover to move over to Eastern Germany, as opposed to her getting to the West.For those living today it's almost impossible to comprehend how it was like to live in DDR (Eastern Germany) during the communist years. It was a society impossible to imagine, only possibly equaled today by North Korea. The state intelligence police, Stasi, was almost everywhere, planting spies and surveillance equipment.This film doesn't explain the system. You're just put right into it. This might make it hard to understand without having the knowledge of how extreme this society was, almost like George Orwell's great and scary novel "1984" in real life. Barbara is under constant surveillance when she's not far away from people. She's so suspected to do illegal things, that she frequently body and anally strip searched when the Stasi visits her.I visited Eastern Germany 1988, before the wall came down. The visit marked me for life, both as a Westerner and a Norwegian being able to visit ad a tourist, where they equaled the value of Western currency marks to the Eastern marks, though only valued 1/20th. Still they thought they could keep the longing for the Western freedom from being planted into the DDR-inhabitants. I visited the concentration camp Sachsenhausen, and I experienced the railways where there was no smile to see, the feel of total depression and bleak or hardly any colored lights, as an opposite to the sparkling neon lights of the West, and the total surveillance of the center of Berlin. No western lyrics and western music was allowed, hardly any Western cars. If it could have any kind of opposition interpreted into it, or dreams of the Western freedom, it was disallowed. If you tried to flee to the West, you would be instantly shot! I was terrified for four hours in my last trip back to Western Berlin was halted for four hours when they took my passport and ran away with it.Today it seems we're not afraid of being under constant surveillance. This is just another reminder of how terrible it s not to have a free will, and not have the right to your own life. It's so inhumane and humiliating. But we're in our way right into the same kind of society.It's a very god film, but the understated telling and explaining is really too difficult to understand for most today. When Barbara is giving away her opportunity to flee, she's giving up her dreams of freedom. I think most without having the background to understand this, will understand the film. For most it will seem slow and leave too many questions. So read yourself up on what the DDR-politics where before you see this.And remember that freedom is something we can't give away! Ever!