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One day before her planned escape, Barbara is on duty caring for a critically ill patient named Mario, whose suicide attempt had resulted in his being hospitalized. Barbara discovers that Mario has not been recovering from his traumatic head injury as well as believed and requires immediate brain surgery. She tracks Reiser down on his day off, to inform him of Mario's urgent need of surgery. She finds him at the home of the Stasi agent who has been overseeing her monitoring. Reiser is treating the agent's wife, who is dying of cancer. Reiser persuades her to return to the hospital – the same night of her planned escape – so that he can perform the surgery, with her assistance as anaesthesiologist during the operation. Following her agreement to be there, yet still planning her escape, Barbara accepts Reiser's invitation to let him cook a lunch for her at his home on the same day. When Reiser finally tells Barbara that he is happy to have her there with him, she kisses him. Then she abruptly pulls away from him, and returns to her house to continue preparing to escape.
The Stasi punishes her for the hours in which they cannot find her by searching her house, strip-searching and cavity-searching her. In her new job, she works in pediatric surgery, a department led by chief physician André Reiser. Reiser eventually tells her a story (whose veracity she questions) of how he too had lost his job at a more prestigious hospital in Berlin – he was responsible for an accident with an incubator that left two premature infants blind. The Stasi had agreed to keep it quiet if he agreed to relocate to the provincial hospital and to work for them. So now Reiser reports on suspected people, including Barbara. Early on, when the police deliver Stella, a young runaway from a labour camp, to the hospital for the fourth time, Reiser thinks Stella is malingering. Barbara intervenes and orders removal of the restraints on the patient, readily diagnosing her with meningitis. During her recovery, Stella develops a strong attachment to Barbara, whose welcome bedside manner includes reading the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to her.
The humorless, implacable Schutz contemptuously describes Barbara as "sulky, " and she does keep to herself both inside the hospital and outside. The reasons for this are quickly made clear: The Stasi has Barbara under almost constant surveillance, complete with randomly timed and humiliating physical searches, and she is in fact still hoping to escape to the West for reasons that are as much romantic as political. The young and affable Andre's connection to this situation is more multi-faceted than it at first seems. Though he initially appears to be simply a friendly guy wanting to help with her transition, Barbara immediately suspects, and correctly so, that he is also a Stasi informant, someone who will be reporting to the secret police about her on a regular basis. Best of 2012: Video Games | Art | Theater | Awesome Whatever else Barbara is, she is an effective and committed doctor who is invested in her patients' well-being. When a difficult young woman named Stella (Jasna Fritzi Bauer), an inmate in a local work camp, is admitted, Barbara immediately diagnoses her problem as meningitis.
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Andre, the doctor who runs the clinic (played by the gentle, hunky Ronald Zehrfeld), is an informer for the Stasi, and yet he does not seem devoted or fanatical in that role. His primary priority is his patients. He would also like to get to The Hague someday, to see Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson" in person, although his hope for being allowed such a trip is dim. Andre recognizes Barbara's gift at her job during her first shift, when she correctly diagnoses a teenage girl ( Jasna Fritzi Bauer) with meningitis, the signs of which the rest of the doctors had missed. Barbara, the cool character self-consciously smoking in the park, is an entirely different person at her job. The girl has escaped from Torgau, a Socialist work camp nearby, and Barbara treats her with a mischievous warm camaraderie, and reads to her at night. Barbara's choice of book is significant: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In Mark Twain's classic, Huck and Jim, on the run, take to the Mississippi River in a raft, loosening the fetters that bind them on the mainland, all while plunging deeper and deeper into slave country.
"Barbara" is another type of resistance movie. That's partly because it concerns a dissident who, with modest, obstinate anger, pushes back against totalitarianism, but also because Mr. Petzold refuses movie clichés as strongly as he does political orthodoxy. At once regionally specific and a student of all cinema, he draws on numerous traditions and makes them his own. His early love of Hitchcock, for one, is evident in the prickles of unease that creep into his work, creating a cold climate of paranoia and an oft-justified fear of an imminent threat. Image Credit... Adopt Films Crucially, almost as soon as Barbara appears she's being watched by another East German. Her watcher is a young doctor, Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), a friendly looking teddy bear who peers at her from an upper-story window. There's someone else in the room, too: Klaus Schütz (Rainer Bock), a dry, severe, gray man whose officiousness envelops him like a cloud of dust. "Is that her? " Andre asks. The scene seems innocent enough — just two men gossiping about a new colleague — but that's only because it has yet to be revealed that Klaus works for the Stasi, the East German secret police.
Their hospital becomes a locus of decision-making—a space where every action is informed, to varying degrees, by the conflicting needs of medical duty, self-preservation, and life in a police state. It's suspense by induction rather than coercion. Aided by a vivid soundscape (discussed at length in Daniel Kasman and David Phelps' interview), Petzold draws the viewer into Barbara's (and, by extension, Barbara 's) world. The shrill metallic doorbell of Barbara's apartment becomes an ill omen. The radio in the hospital break room—piping in enthusiastic coverage of the Moscow Olympics—becomes a reminder of the culture within which these exiled big-city doctors (unlike their intentions, Barbara and André's sense of duty to their patients is never suspect) operate. The whistly countryside wind suggests an impersonal, ambiguous wilderness existing just outside the bounds of their orderly lives. Objects—like the wad of cash Barbara will use to fund her escape or the fat-tired bicycle she uses to get around—develop dramatic significance through recurrence rather than conventional emphasis.
Petzold has long been fascinated with Germany's ongoing east-west dichotomy, but previous films have been primarily concerned with the legacy of the Berlin Wall and its fall. His feature debut The State I Am In (2000) examined the consequences of life on the run for the 15-year-old daughter of a couple with a terrorist past, hinting obliquely at a Baader-Meinhof connection. Follow-up Wolfsburg (2003), on the surface a melodrama about the consequences of a hit-and-run, gave way to a study of social mobility in a town being revitalised by industry after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. Ghosts (2005) and Yella (2007) portrayed contemporary Germany as a grim, hard, industrial environment, where identity is shifting and unstable and people merely play at life. The thematic exception is Jerichow (2008), in which Petzold shifted his attention to the more recent issues of immigration and the Afghanistan war, and yet there too the ghosts of the past lingered. In some respects, then, Barbara marks something of a reverse step for Petzold, looking back to an earlier moment, before the country was supposedly unified.
Barbara Petzold Country Germany Born 8 August 1955 (age 65) Hammerunterwiesenthal, East Germany Ski club SC Traktor Oberwiesenthal Medal record Women's cross-country skiing Representing East Germany Olympic Games 1980 Lake Placid 10 km 4 × 5 km relay 1976 Innsbruck World Championships 1974 Falun 1978 Lahti 1982 Oslo Barbara Petzold (later Beyer, born 8 August 1955) is a former East German Cross-country skier who competed during the 1970s and early 1980s. She won two gold medals at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid in the 10 km and the 4 × 5 km relay, and a bronze in the 4 × 5 km relay at the 1976 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck. [1] Petzold also won four medals at the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships, earning three silvers (1974: 10 km, 4 × 5 km relay; 1978: 4 × 5 km relay) and one bronze (1982: 4 × 5 km relay). [2] She is sometimes listed as Barbara Petzold-Beyer in results lists. She was a member of the East German legislature or Volkskammer. [ citation needed] Cross-country skiing results [ edit] All results are sourced from the International Ski Federation (FIS).
Because of that, people seldom did. And even if someone opened up, others could just as easily interpret that as a false invite. Barbara is a doctor who, in the eyes of the regime, … nina hoss can murder me if she wants to Funny story that isn't so funny but sometimes I love how life works: this film was on Netflix a few years back and once I watched it in full, I'd go back to rewatch scenes almost every day. Since it's been taken off Netflix, my life has not known peace. I downloaded a low quality version of it but it doesn't do Petzold's genius vision justice. But I've rewatched it all the same. This isn't a new story for myself because it seems like I'm cursed to fall in love with movies that I just can't find as easily as most! So on this boring Wednesday evening I was spending my night watching the quebecois channels on tv just to… 58/100 Period signifiers are so subtle that it took a while before I realized the Wall was still intact. (I'm sure it'd be obvious to Germans, and probably also to anyone who pays more attention to cars and clothes than I do. )