MovieChat Forums > Barbara (2012) Discussion > The Note?

The Note?

posted 10 years ago by Hypatia42
13 replies | jump to latest

The note Barbara writes to her lover has me perplexed. I believe I understand her character and her choices. When I watched the movie I didn't get a look at the note she wrote and I'm wondering if it was legible.

Basically, I'm wondering if it contradicts my understanding of her:

I honestly don't believe she loves her colleague. While he is an interesting man who shows her understanding, her reactions are those of appreciation, not love. She is grateful for the small tenderness, but she does not melt for him.

I think she saved Stella rather than herself for the same reason she strokes the hair of the sleeping child and checks on the suicide case. She is a doctor and a woman who tries to do no harm. Stella is a child whose suffering has been too great for her to survive in East Germany. She is fresh faced, delicate, and pregnant. Barbara sacrifices herself, does herself extraordinary harm, to save the girl. I think Barbara loves her boyfriend with all her being but cannot allow herself happiness in place of the girl's safety.

The ending is a macabre fulfillment of a previous conversation; she is in the rural lands to help the peasants who made her education possible. I think her
note tries to explain this.

Thoughts, anyone?

[–] 10 years ago

[deleted]

[–] DogtownGirl 10 years ago

SPOILERS FOLLOW. SPOILER ALERT!

My thoughts about this topic are as follows:

I think that Barbara ended up being at least as curious about Andre as she began to fall in love with him.
Why else would she have so impulsively kissed him when they were both in his apartment, and he was cooking her dinner? I mean, B. was normally so self-guarded, that she certainly wasn't going to kiss Andre unless he meant something to her.

After letting Stella go, B. came back to her practice, to be with her patients and then to go back the practice along side Andre.
>> The look (ahhh, that look!) that Andre gave to Barbara at the very end of the film says it alllllllll!I

** There MUST be more than one way to skin this Cat! **

[–] Hypatia42 10 years ago

Hmmm. Spoiler.

I understand the romance in what you are saying, but I cannot see it in the situation. Barbara lives in a country with a brutal military police. She has likely been tortured, even if she wasn't passionately in love, every cell in her body must want to flee to freedom. Her home invasions include body cavity searches, which were done by the soviets in such a way as to maximize harm to the recipient as a form of mental warfare. I understand why she must want the younger more desperate girl to have freedom first, but can you really think Barbara will now stop her attempts to flee?

I honestly don't see how she can love the doctor. I think he is a complacent and small minded fool, but I'm willing to see him as the intended object of her affection if the film was meant for us to see it that way. I just... I'm not sure. He helps the state enforce unjust rules, he is a part of the pettiness, and continues their lies, which she catches him doing. How can that be loved? I think she kisses him out of pity for his simplicity.

[–] DogtownGirl 10 years ago

skindili,

Yes, you are correct. Barbara was subjected to unpleasant experiences living where she did in the film, however ... let's not forget that it wasn't Andre who did those searches, eh?

Wait, so you think her kissing him so passionately and directly was out of ... pity for his simple-mindedness? you gotta be kidding! At first Andre was not to be trusted and he WAS possibly spying on B., but over time as he began to admire her dedication to her patients, her compassion, her dedication to the work, and to Stella, then ... he began to fall in love with her and see B. soften, right before his very eyes!!

** There MUST be more than one way to skin this Cat! **

[–] TMIGuy 9 years ago

We may not know if Barbara loves Andre nor her boyfriend. In the end, it does not matter. She intended to leave. It is certain. After kissing Andre, she immediately leaves. She is preparing to go when Stella arrives. She doesn't expect Stella. She intends to take Stella with her but prepares to send Stella in her place, writing a note to let her boyfriend know. She truly expects him to be there in Denmark although there is evidence to distrust him. She does not know the consequences of her staying (how could she?). When she arrives at the patient's bedside, she does not kiss Andre as if greeting a loved one. We do not know it is fully a sacrifice. Her boyfriend still might have the option of living close to her. They did not know where she was, but that has happened before. She definitely stayed because she loves her profession and we know that her boyfriend would try to make her give that up (remember that he says that she would not need to work in the west).
One thing that I loved about this movie is that it treats the main character as an independent entity. No chauvinism here except how men who go to the West treat the women.
Personally, I believe this movie is about freedom of choice being universal. She believed that Western living is freedom. She discovered, through Andre, that there are many freedoms and that she already had one of them. She discovers that she is strong enough to stay and endure the consequences.
Also, I've read the back and forth opinions of 2-3 Western women (I assume by the names given) and 1 plotterist. Everyone writes expecting this character to be motivated by love or opportunity. What is love. Does everyone, world-wide, share the same attitudes as "Western love"? Why does she need to conform to the idea of a "typical" woman at all? She doesn't. Reverse all the genders and you'd see this movie in a very different way. I wouldn't.

[–] Jes' Sayin' (5953) 4 years ago

I wonder if she could have even practiced medicine in West Germany. Probably she would have to train and take the exams all over again, which might take years. What a pain.

[–] theplotterist 9 years ago

What a simplistic reaction! That's a very superficial reading of this movie and the character of Barbara. We have no idea if she loves Andre. We really don't know if Andre loves her or just appreciates a competent doctor at his side or is trying to get closer to her to spy more effectively.

That is the point of the whole damn movie!!!! Under Stasi eyes, all communication is warped and truncated. It would be unrealistic to expose passion to each other AND the viewing audience.

Whatever B. and A. share is hidden because exposure could be awful for them. Watch the movie again. Then ask yourself why B. chooses to stay rather than enjoy Western "freedoms". We simply don't know, really. The point is when reasons must stay hidden, we are only left with interpretation. In a sense, we are the Stasi interpreting very ambiguous actions and unsaid feelings in a myriad of ways. Are we doing to go "by the book" or the dissection?

I felt like a spy watching this movie - the portraits were both too real and yet undefined. And I loved every minute of it.

[–] Hypatia42 9 years ago

I think you are misreading the intent of the film and the film-makers. We are shown Barbara's passion, both among the trees and in the hotel room. We are shown her sweating, crying, suffering, and self-pitying not in a voyeuristic way, but in a character study. I am not there to convict her, but to understand her. And maybe, to appreciate her. This is not my personal will, this is the construct of the narrative. We are not spying through peep-holes, or listening to recordings, we're not interrogating her landlady. Do you notice we are never shown the notes on her case, or the words of her betrayers, like the landlady's, we never see her personal items in the cabinets or the little objects she keeps organized when the police throw them about. We are not her interrogators, if you want that, watch the Lives of Others. The camera and the story follows Barbara, and to a lesser extent, Andre.

There is more than enough information to draw conclusions about Barbara's decisions. I do believe that she saved the pregnant girl rather than herself because, unlike all the others, she is a doctor who is paying back the peasants who made her education possible. In some warped way she is a better soviet than the others, for she valued her fellow more than herself.

The idea that the film would dare draw a parallel between the viewer and the secret police, who were responsible for genocide in eastern Europe, the execution of political prisoners to the tune of millions, and the forced labor of millions more, is heinous beyond credibility. Careful with over intellectualizing. Again, if you want to see a film as you try to describe this one, watch The Lives of Others.

[–] theplotterist 9 years ago

Wow! What a bunch of florid words you use. Where did I ever say we interrogate B or listen to recordings? That is YOUR assumption, not mine.

It sounds like you love melodrama in your choice of interpretations of movies and in your responses. Far be it from you to understand a basic film theory of audience as voyeur, that has existed from the first days of cinema. This film plays a game of hide and seek with the audience, in the same way Barbara and other characters are playing with the Stasi. Get it yet? Is that too subtle for you? Not enough emotional impact and purple prose?

Interpreting film so superficially, according to one's own emotional investment, is an infantile way to watch film. One might as well interpret the emotions of the cartoons in a Disney movie, if that is the depth of one's perspective. I pay Barbara the respect it deserves by allowing it a philosophical and cinematic interpretation. I may be wrong but not because YOU must have your melodrama.

I've watch Das Leben der Anderens a couple of times. Totally different movie, beautiful in it's own way.

[–] Hypatia42 9 years ago

No, interrogating Barbara was not your assumption, nor is it mine. It, like the other things I mentioned, would be reasonable pieces of evidence that the film was constructed to make the audience take the place of the Stasi or feel like a voyeur, which was your statement. The absence of all such techniques, I hold, is evidence this was not the intent of the film. I understand the audience as voyeur and the implication of the audience as complicit or participant. Hitchcock's Psycho, Rear Window, or Peeping Tom, The Lives of Others, and particularly Coppola's The Conversation are full of examples of the eavesdropping, peephole staring, and personal item inspection I mentioned. As they are absent in this case, I do not see your position as well supported. Further, it is not melodramatic to cite evidence the Stasi were heinous and that many, particularly the German speaking actors/writer/director would be hesitant to draw a comparison between them and the audience, as you did.

You are welcome to experience all cinema in whatever way you wish, and you are welcome to share those personal experiences. However, discovering the intent of the filmmakers, and reconstructing their interpretation of the material is a worthwhile cause. This is what I was trying to do when I originally asked about the letter.

I do not believe I am pursing or invested in the superficial experience of cinema, particularly not melodrama. As a student of history, I value educational parables. As a student of narrative, I value discovering authorial intent. Character studies are often a vehicle to communicate historical experience because so few people read the current headlines, much less the historical ones. Given the camera and dialogue follows Barbara and her understated experiences, it seems the film's intent is to show how one personality type experienced the iron curtain. My evidence for this is the camera's monitoring of Barbara's movements almost entirely without narration or perspective from others, the title of the film as Barbara and not Case #, and the suppression of incidental conversation in favor of Barbara's internal conflicts while still giving political context to her experiences.

Incidentally, 'purple prose' means flowery language. I seek precision.

[–] Stirchley 8 years ago

I do believe that she saved the pregnant girl

You have completely missed a major plot point. Stella was not pregnant. When she came to Barbara's apartment, she was bleeding down her legs. She had been forced to undergo an abortion.

[–] Bogong 8 years ago

I do not believe that Stella has had an abortion.

I think that it is from a scratch that Stella received going under the barbed wire when she fled the 'work gang'. It has now become infected and is the reason for the treatment Barbara gives her.

[–] Jes' Sayin' (5953) 4 years ago

this