Atmospheric and nuanced, director Christian Petzhold delivers his usual exploration of moral ambiguity against a cultured setting—this time, the stark socialist countryside. Barbara is a West German doctor, banished to East Germany for an undisclosed crime. She is constantly watched by the secret police and the head doctor at the hospital she’s been assigned to. Untrusting and solitary, Barbara bikes to work, fully self-sufficient, and cautiously takes rides from Andre, her supervisor who files her reports.
She has a strapping blond lover from her former life, who smuggles her favorite cigarettes and stockings. She rejects the provincial surroundings she’s been sent to and has secret exchanges of money and information in an attempt to return to her old life, or wait out her sentence elsewhere.
But she soon becomes enamored with the patients of the hospital—a wayward girl sent to the work camps, a suicidal young man with a brain lesion and the children in the ward. Most of all, she grows accustomed to biking through the countryside, conversing with Andre, and realizes, perhaps that her fate could be worse.
In the end, its up to the viewer to decide, when Barbara forgoes her chance to secretly evacuate to Denmark. Accompanied by pianos, bicycles, Rembrandt, and ratatouille, Barbara emerges through a dichotomous lens—being pushed and pulled between east and west. Let’s be honest though, if she didn’t fall in love with Andre, she had to at least have fallen in love with his incredibly styled apartment and his herb garden in the back. But really, the option between cosmopolitan Berlin lover and a burly country doctor?
Choices are hard.