Barbara
Weights of Being
Is Barbara, set in the early 1980s, a work of ‘ostalgie’, a term used to describe people’s feelings towards East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the East’s unification with the West? That seems an exaggeration, but next to a work like the commercially successful The Lives of Others, which so negatively explored invasions of privacy under the Stasi, few would emerge from it thinking the collapse of communism and the reunification of Germany could have been anything but a good thing. Christian Petzold’s Barbara hinges on a question famously explored in that early 1980s Clash song, Should I Stay or Should I Go? At the beginning of the film, it wouldn’t be much of a question; by the end, it is provisionally answered as a decision to stay.
Titular Barbara (Nina Hoss) is a physician banished to a provincial hospital after she seeks to leave the GDR, and meets a doctor, Andre Reiser (Ronald Zehrfeld), who has been forced into the provinces too, but for very different reasons. (An instance of medical malfeasance.) While she has a lover, Jorg, in the west who, on a couple of occasions during the film, crosses the border to be with her (an easier journey than the other way around), by the end of the film, she has accumulated obligations and feelings that mean leaving isn’t so easy. This has little to do with East Germany being better than the West (she has nothing to compare it with, except the relative luxuries that come her way, courtesy of her lover), but that there is a weight of existence in the East, against the lightness of exile across the border. It would make sense that Czech writer Milan Kundera would write a brilliant book called The Unbearable Lightness of Being, as an exile himself, and where in the book the question of the West’s opportunities comes up against the East’s ties: the place where one was born, brought up, schooled, and where friends and family remain. In the novel, the narrator says about one of his Czech emigres, ‘‘after four years in Geneva, Sabina settled in Paris, but she could not escape her melancholy’’, and later in the chapter discusses her ‘unbearable lightness of being.’ Melancholy is surely a deep feeling that would have nothing to do with unbearable lightness, but the melancholy is centrally about her new weightlessness, without the density of a life that has accumulated meaning. If that meaning has been built over many years in one place, can we easily transport ourselves to another country without feeling simultaneously very light and very heavy? It is the weight of the past that allows for melancholia, but the lightness of the present that allows for reinventing oneself. In Kundera’s case, he settled in Paris and even started writing his books in French. The two main characters in the novel, however, return to Czechoslovakia. For Kundera, the answer was to go; for his main characters it was to go and return. For Barbara, it is to stay, however uncertainly.
In the film’s first half, it mainly provides reasons for her to leave. Though Andre clearly develops feelings for her, these aren’t at all reciprocated, and since she is under surveillance by the state, sent to a rural hospital, and has a lover she is passionate about when he crosses the border to see her, why shouldn’t she wish to leave? Speaking of the film, and why he was attracted to a story set in 1980s East Germany, Petzold (born in 1960) said, ‘‘My parents fled the GDR when I was still very young, so I grew up in the Western part of Germany. But my parents kept travelling back to the East part quite regularly and they took my brothers and me with them, so East Germany was not so unfamiliar to me.’’ (Electric Sheep) His parents reflected perhaps an ambivalence that could manifest itself over many years, as they managed to move between the two countries. How they managed to do this, Petzold doesn’t explain, since his parents weren’t Western Germans visiting the East, but East Germans who had chosen the West over the East: it would have seemed a political decision that wouldn’t have pleased the East German authorities. But whatever the hows and whys, Petzold suggests this was a mixed feeling they managed to resolve, and that covered presumably decades.
While Barbara is very far from melodrama, next to the story Petzold tells about his own family, it can seem like it. A central element of melodrama is the quickening of the dramatic. As Thomas Elsaesser says, ‘‘in ordinary language we call something melodramatic, what we often mean is an exaggerated rise-and-fall pattern in human actions and emotional responses.’’ (‘Tales of Sound and Fury’) This would be an unfair description of the film, but central to its strength is finding a plausible contraction of time as, within a few months, Barbara moves from adamantly determined to leave, to ambivalently deciding to stay, as the second half provides several reasons why she might not choose to emigrate. She, in time, develops feelings for Andre, and also wants to help a young woman, Stella, who keeps running away from a nearby labour camp and ends up in the hospital, becoming attached to Barbara, and also pregnant. Then there is a young man, who, after a suicide attempt, seems to be recovering, but Andre isn’t so sure. Barbara discovers that he appears to have lost the capacity to emote and feels that he needs an operation after all. The thing is, Andre wants her to help over the weekend, and this is the time she has taken off to escape the country.
From one perspective, the film is very strong and, from another, deliberately weak. What do we mean by this? Petzold makes clear that Barbara needs to leave and has both the reason and the opportunity to do so. She is in love and has the money that her lover gives her to pay someone to take her across the water from East Germany to Denmark. The more she delays, the greater the likelihood that the authorities, who raid her home on more than one occasion, will find the cash. The first time, she hides the money far away from her flat, but the second time, close to the date when she needs to leave, she stows it in a pipe at home. Luckily, they don’t find it. These are moments of classical suspense, with the immediate, scenic threat of someone finding the money met with the more elongated period of time where the longer she would be putting off going, the more chance the authorities will find a reason to make sure she will never leave at all. This is the narratively strong, but the narratively weak rests on the texture of the film, on that weightiness of existence Kundera invokes. These would include the Rembrandt painting on the wall and the discussion between Barbara and Andre over it. She sees a mistake in The Anatomy Lesson: that it’s ‘‘the right hand and it's too large.’’ Andre explains why he doesn’t think it is a mistake, and believes if it is, it is the mistake of the surgeons, one where we can all concentrate better on the body they are opening up. ‘‘We are with him. Not them.’’ Later, in Andre’s house, she picks up a book of stories, and one of them is Turgenev’s ‘The District Doctor’. Andre describes it to her, speaking of an ugly old physician and the young woman he treats who is dying, and who projects her feelings onto this man because there is no one else, as she will die without having loved. After he tells it. Barbara goes over and kisses Andre before abruptly leaving.
But why are these weak moments? We use weak only to differentiate such scenes from the sort of strong ones that propel narrative, while weaker ones slow it down, still it or reverse its propulsion. The strong story hinges on Barbara’s need to escape the GDR; the weak one on a burgeoning desire to stay. Elements in the story that might hamper her need to leave needn’t be part of the weakness, and they are often suspense devices in a strong story, especially when they look like they might hamper a protagonist’s intentions. When Neil McCauley in Heat decides to take a detour to kill a disloyal member of his team, this is still part of the strong narrative as we hope he will get the job done, and still be able to make a flight to New Zealand. In this sense, when Barbara agrees to help with the op, while she should be prioritising her escape, this can still be part of the strong story, if we believe that she needs to get it done and get to the coast in time to leave. The weak story, however, works underneath the strong one and subverts it, changes one’s sense of priorities, and allows the character (and by extension the viewer) to see different perspectives.
One way of looking at strong stories is to see them as perspectiveless; that they have a trajectory without perspectival modulation. When screenwriting expert Syd Field quotes Aristotle saying ‘‘life consists in action and its end is a mode of action, not a quality’’, he takes this to mean ‘‘your character has to be active, has to be doing things, causing things to happen, not just reacting all the time.’’ (Screenplay) Whether this is a fair assumption over Aristotle’s claim, it doesn’t seem useful as a way of understanding cinema narration, except at its most straightforward. It risks perspectivelessness, which isn’t always such a problem, and many an action film could be ruined by incorporating weak aspects into it. A Bourne, Bond or Ethan Hunt film might have some random person going to the bathroom, just at the moment a hero might want to take out a villain, and there the viewer is waiting in amused anticipation for the action to get started once the person leaves the restroom. It is part of the strong story and merely a delaying tactic that shows the filmmaker manipulating the viewer all the better to kick off the fight sequence. (As we find in Mission Impossible 4). Equally, we don’t expect our heroes in such films to observe anybody’s behaviour unless it is part of the calculating need to discover who they can trust and who they cannot. Aristotle might not have realised he would be describing a Tom Cruise film many centuries before the event, but that is really what Field takes from the philosopher’s remark in this instance.
Yet while we are insisting that Barbara is a film with a strong story that allows the weaker one to become increasingly dominant, as the film provides us with good reasons why she should stay rather than go, plenty of films have weak stories, all the better to explore an idea that doesn’t need strong storytelling to manifest it. Jeanne Dielman 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Wanda, Five Easy Pieces, The Green Ray and La notte are all weak story films, as they aren’t predicated on any action that can propel the tale forward, even if, by the end, few will doubt that the films conclude with weight and significance. Nevertheless, they don’t feel like stories that aim to tell one story, and arrive instead at a conclusion contrary to the initial premise. Barbara does, which is why we have been talking about the film as a strong story that gets overtaken by its ostensibly weaker one. The central character starts wanting nothing more than to leave the country and be with her Western lover. At the end, she will stay and most likely be with Andre.
Petzold has often been drawn to strong narratives that incorporate weaker ones, which can give complexity and texture to what seems initially a clear goal. Jerichow borrows from The Postman Rings Twice to set its plot in motion, in Yella, the central character gets caught up in various money-making schemes, and in Transit, the main figure initially escapes arrest in a present-day occupied Paris, yet the films often re-persectivise the premise. Though part of the Berlin School, which includes Thomas Arslan and Angela Schanelec, Petzold is the most inclined to generate narrative purpose, which is why he creates strong stories in the first place. When Oskar Roehler claimed the Berlin School films ‘‘are always slow, always depressing, nothing is ever really said in them [...] they are always well thought of and have an audience of between five and ten thousand" (‘Capitalism Has No More Natural Enemies: The Berlin School’), he wouldn’t be talking about Petzold films. Many of them receive much broader distribution for a start. Box-Office Mojo notes that Barbara made $4.1 dollars. No fortune, but a large sum next to others in the Berlin School. Schanelec’s I Was at Home, But made $14,000 according to IMDB. Central to this relative success may rest on Petzold’s strong narrative premises, as Petzold then pushes through on a weaker one within it.
What the combination of weak and strong provides is a deft development of story with the simultaneous elaboration of emotional complications underpinning that drive, and which gives a film like Barbara a greater force than if it had followed through only on the strong one. Initially, Barbara works at the rural hospital as a necessary chore. ‘‘She won’t even be one second too early’’, an official tells Andre when the doctor sees her sitting on a bench having a cigarette before her shift. (Later, instead of sitting with the doctor and his colleagues, at lunch, she goes and sits at another table.) The official is part of the Stasi, and when Andre asks what she is like, he says that if she were a six-year-old, you would say she was sulky. In this sequence, we see Barbara from a distance, with Andre looking out of a window and onto the park bench where she sits. We might also wonder whether Andre is to be trusted, as he is speaking convivially enough to a man who will later ransack her apartment, looking for any signs that she might soon wish to leave the country. It is a suspicion we might have all but forgotten about until near the end of the film, when we may now assume he is a person Barbara can trust entirely. Looking for Andre, someone tells her she will find him at a cafe on the square, and as she enters, she sees the Stasi officer. She asks for the doctor, and he says Andre is upstairs. She goes up and enters an apartment where she finds the doctor administering to the office’s wife, who is dying of cancer.
It is a good example of the weak and the strong combining, as we wonder for a moment if Barbara has been played. There she is, determined to leave the country, and the doctor has persuaded her to stay and complete an operation. Has the doctor been an informer all along, and is she not only risking her opportunity to get out of the country, but also going to end up incarcerated again? The strong story would show that she can’t trust even the doctor, and must continue with her plan, while the doctor and co pursue her, and we have a climactic cross-cut as she makes it on the raft just in time. Instead, of course, she sees that the doctor is helping a woman even if she happens to be the wife of a Stasi officer. After Barbara asks him if it’s usual for him, Andre says, ‘To help the dying?’ She says, ‘to help arseholes.’ ‘When they’re sick, yes.’’ He replies. He doesn’t want to support the state; he wants to support the individual, and if we might be reminded of the Stasi officer’s remark about Barbara’s sulkiness, it rests on her failing to see that the priority isn’t one’s opinions, but a patient’s health. An argument could be made that the doctor can say this aware that he isn’t being persecuted by that very arsehole. Barbara is. The reason Andre is in the provinces rests on a mistake a colleague made who was under his command. They confused Celsius and Fahrenheit when using a new machine from New Zealand, and two babies ended up blind. Andre is there over a medical error; Barbara is there over a political decision. She has reason to fear the Stasi; he has reason to try and save as many lives as he can, trying to make amends for those two children.
Yet what matters in this scene, where they discuss the Stasi officer and his wife, is that Andre can be trusted, and the strong story fades as the much more textured, weaker one becomes unequivocally prominent. Barbara helps with the operation and also decides that Stella should take her place on the raft. The story’s ‘selfish’ propulsion gives way to a modulated sense of purpose. Barbara's desire to exit a communist country and enter the West, the film proposes, has been too poorly predicated: passion for a man and a desire for a more prosperous existence. When we see Jorg again visiting her in East Germany, the sequence takes place in an Interhotel, but she cannot get in by the front door, and has to clamber through the window. When she speaks to a woman who is the lover of Jorg’s colleague, she perhaps sees the imbalance in any relationship between someone from the West and and the East, and what might seem a key component of the strong plot (as her lover explains how she can escape the country) becomes an element of the weak one, as the film cuts to her shortly afterwards on the train, looking pensive. If she is looking forward to her escape, nothing in her face suggests it.
David Howard says, ‘‘Stories don’t just happen. Stories are created by some kind of collision between conflicting forces. There are three basic kinds of collisions at work in stories: a collision with the world of the story – the world is hostile to the characters; a collision with other opposing characters in the world; and a collision between one aspect of a character and another, adversarial aspect of the same character.’’ (How to Build a Great Screenplay) One could say the film contains all three: the world, East Germany, the opposing character, the Stasi officer, and the internal conflict, whether she will go or stay. Yet the latter isn’t initially a conflict at all; the collision with the officer finally becomes negligible, and East Germany moves from being an oppressive regime to one that can accommodate many of her needs and desires. This isn’t because the regime changes (that would take another few years), but because Barbara’s mindset has. The film doesn’t follow through on its premises; it retreats from them. Instead of a film about external change, it becomes one of internal perspective. We don’t know what is going through Barbara’s mind when she travels back on the train after the assignation at the hotel, but we might wonder if what she would gain by going to the west wouldn’t be much more than material prosperity, and a partner to whom she would be initially awfully reliant. While this might initially seem attractive, especially as she finds herself exiled in a small town, it is a lot less so by the conclusion. When Andre and the officer look out that window while Barbara sits on a bench refusing to do a minute more of her shift than necessary, Andre asks if she is alone in the town. The officer says, ‘‘her incarceration disintegrated her circle of friends.’’ By the end of the film, she has a job that involves her and a relationship she may embark upon. But what matters perhaps more than the choice she has made is the escape from a decision she has decided not to make. To have escaped to the West would have been categorical; to stay can be provisional. To have gone would have been to rely on Jorg; to stay doesn’t mean she needs to rely on Andre. This provisionality doesn’t mean it will be easy for her to leave the country: would Jorg cough up the money once more? Could she raise it another way?
Such thoughts might be idle – why should we concern ourselves with questions beyond the diegesis? Yet it is more to pose a question that, if the film had followed through on its strong story, would have been an assumption. This would have indicated that, of course, the West was superior to the East, and who wouldn’t want the liberal and prosperous West over the dour, impoverished and illiberal GDR? Co-written by Harun Farocki, a Marx-inflected experimental filmmaker and theorist, Petzold’s film is hardly communist propaganda, but it does at least avoid the implicit pro-Western bias that the strong, strong narrative throughline would have implied. Any state that arrests its citizens for seeking a new life elsewhere, that banishes them to a hospital in the countryside when they would prefer to work in Berlin, and that sends officials to search people’s homes, isn’t one to be defended on principle. But Petzold does propose that by lingering on the details of a life, we can see pleasures in it that go beyond the broad claims of a given ideology or government.
In another film, A Taste of Cherry, that plays on the strong and the weak story, on the need for a man to find someone to help him take his life, and the desire potentially to go on living, the person who says he will help, also offers a story that explains why his own suicidal wishes were countered by knowing that he would never again taste mulberries. The film remains moot on whether the central character lives or dies, but we might see a variation of it in Barbara, if we reckon that what matters in both films is seeing things from different perspectives. In the hotel room, Barbara and the other woman are flicking through a catalogue, looking at wedding rings. It seems like a consumerist dream as an arid nightmare, and might be one of the reasons why Barbara retreats from escape. In contrast, after visiting Andre at the Stasi officer’s place, where she is mistaken for his girlfriend, the family gives her a bowl of vegetables that seem to have come fresh from the garden. In the car, Andre asks about the veg, and she says there are courgettes, onions, tomatoes, and aubergines . The film offers an insert shot of the bowl of vegetables from above, and they look as earthy and real as the rings in the catalogue, also shown in an insert shot from above, had appeared remote and artificial. Andre suggests she join him, and they can make ratatouille.
It is back at his house that she picks up the book with the story by Turgenev, and where she also kisses him before retreating, saying she needs to go. But while there, she seems comfortable in the environment that contrasts so strongly with the Interhotel. The house has books, paintings on the walls, rugs on the floor, a piano, and a solid, dark wood dining table and chairs. At one moment, he steps outside the house and into a large garden, and Barbara sees him plucking herbs through the double doors. It is the good life from a certain perspective, and this is what Barbara couldn’t seem to see at the film’s beginning. Whether it is a better one, the film doesn’t say, but it is a different one, and Petzold, making the film in 2012, is aware that the audience knows it has since vanished, leaving in place a Western, neo-liberalism without the option of a retreat from it. (Even if, only four years earlier, in 2008, it looked like capitalism had collapsed.) Perhaps an aspect of the film’s potential ‘ostalgie’ rests on showing that, whatever Barbara’s dilemma, it was a dilemma, as the film insists that to stay or to go (to choose communism or capitalism) was still possible as an option.
© Tony McKibbin