Our Homeland; Barbara

+ Our Homeland (2012, 100 min) Japan. Director +Yong-Hi Yang
      Sometimes even the most personal, unusual story can find a wide resonance.
      In 1960 Yong-Hi Yang's father sent her three brothers to North Korea, where their life prospects seemed most promising. Japanese-born Koreans faced (continuing) prejudice in Japan; South Korea seemed on the skids. Of course, history proved otherwise. Today the men suffer under the North Korean yoke while the South prospers.
      From that experience the director makes a drama out of one brother's permission to come back to his family in Japan for medical treatment. He is under the constant supervision of a party Guide. Suddenly the government peremptorily summons back all its nationals abroad, so he never does get his treatment. Clearly this personal tragedy will speak to North Korea's victims everywhere, but it has points for the rest of us too.
      The film is superbly scripted and performed. It was one of the most moving presentations at the 2013 Palm Springs Film Festival. It plumbed the personal tragedies that abound in a heartless, tyrannical political system. But at two points it transcended the local issues.
      The first is when, facing the probably final loss of her son, the mother buys his intrusive Guide a handsome suit and suitcase full of clothes. Her immediate motive is to solicit the Guide's help for her doomed son. But metaphorically her gesture says even more. She refuses to hate the enemy, to dehumanize him, to submit to her certainly justified anger. Instead she treats that enemy as a human being, caught in his own trap of duty, and she purges her negativity with an act of unexpected, unrequired generosity.
     The second is the last scene of the film, when the doomed man's sister -- the director's surrogate -- wheels away the suitcase that her brother had so admired. "You could go around the world with that," he'd observed. In their parting chat he accepted his forced return to his strangled life in North Korea, where he now has his own family to help. He urges her to make the most of her life, to grab all the opportunities her freedom grants. As in his mother's gesture, he refuses the negative emotions of self-pity, anger, hatred, and seizes upon what sparse positives he can find. In this spirit the title is especially ironic: the vicious government of North Korea hardly justifies the affection and nostalgia usually connoted by that phrase.

      As it happens, a similar political theme is developed in another Palm Springs presentation, the new German film, +Barbara (2012, 105 min), directed by Christian +Petzold. A female doctor (Nina Hoss) is banished from Berlin to a small provincial hospital in East Germany, where she is under constant surveillance. She is attracted to the doctor in charge (Ronald Zehrfeld), but is constantly aware that he too necessarily serves the Stasi. Here again personal liberties, indeed the most essential promptings of the heart, are chilled by a totalitarian regime. In the end Barbara spurns the opportunity to flee to her lover in the West. Instead she grants that freedom to a young patient whose sufferings she has tried to abate. Instead of fleeing to a life of leisure and comfort she opts for the duty and service that the other doctor has adopted. He, too, makes a gesture of generous duty when he eases the death of the cancer-stricken wife of the local, brutish government agent. As he makes a robust, herbed stew out of their gift of vegetables, he makes a new fulfilled life out of his banishment. Barbara will too. She decides to abandon the "separation" she defined from her East German colleagues in her aloofness, Western cigarettes and eye shadow.
      The hero found his model in a quirk in Rembrandt's painting of an anatomy lesson. It's not about the doctors, he tells Barbara, it's about the patient, the victim. That Barbara enacts when she surrenders her chance for freedom to the troubled girl.