Good Bye, Lenin! (2002)

Contemporary comedies rarely stretch themselves beyond a bickering romantic couple or a bickering couple and a bucket of bodily fluids, which makes the ambition and intelligence of Good bye, Lenin! not simply entertaining but downright refreshing. The movie starts in East Germany before the fall of communism; our hero, Alex (Daniel Bruhl), describes how his mother (Katrin Sass), a true believer in the communist cause, has a heart attack when she sees him being clubbed by police at a protest. She falls into a coma for eight months--during which the Berlin Wall comes down. When she awakens, her fragile health must avoid any shocks, so Alex creates an illusive reality around his bedridden mother to convince her that communism is still alive. Good bye, Lenin! delicately balances wry satire with its rich investment in the lives of Alex, his mother, and other characters around them. Funny, moving, and highly recommended. --Bret Fetzer Amazon.com

Underrated

Wolfgang Becker's 2003 film, Good Bye Lenin!, is not a great film, but it is far better than the usual Hollywood tripe, as well as being a cut above most independent films released by filmmakers not named John Sayles. The two hour long film was written by Becker, Bernd Lichtenberg, Hendrik Handloegten, Christoph Silber, and Achim von Borries, and has a unique, if strained premise- that as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 a devout East German Communist flunky, Christiane Kerner (Katrin Saß), who lived in East Berlin fell into a coma after a heart attack and when she woke eight months later, her whole world changed, but her devoted son decides to recreate the fallen state so as to not be such a great shock to his mother's system.
While the machinations that the son, Alex Kerner (Daniel Brühl- a better looking Ashton Kutcher), his girlfriend Lara (Chulpan Khamatova)- a Russian nurse who was tending to Christiane, sister Ariane (Maria Simon), brother-in-law Rainer (Alexander Beyer), and neighbors go to reveal an occasional chuckle, the film could really have been something special- and great, had it played the drama closer to reality. This is not to say that there are not sweet and funny moments, but they cannot compare with such a great premise and the potential for a real exploration into the human psyche and politics' place within it could have provided. That said, the film, as is, is a very good one, and the acting is stellar. So is how the film deftly avoids falling into being a screed or one dimensional propaganda piece against Communism. We can see the failings of that system when we see how Alex struggles to get a certain type of pickle brand, Spreewald pickles, so his mother will not know the difference. When we see him and his friend Denis (Florian Lukas) ridiculously try to simulate old East German tv newscasts we see how self-defeating a system that denies ingenuity and individuality is. To wave that about as a club is bastardizing the art of the film. If only more artists would learn what Becker's film knows.
What makes Good Bye Lenin! work as a film is not its political implications, nor the political setup, but the human moments, and it is the relative lack of them vis-à-vis the film's length that make the film both a joy and bit of a disappointment, for it seems to be a mix of the old television movie of the week formula from the 1970s and a European arts film, and does not fully succeed either way. The film's lack of poesy is its greatest flaw. But, taken as it is, Good Bye Lenin! is a most worthwhile film and a good chronicle of a clan in an era now passed, long passed, it seems. If other films failed as well as this one does, well, would not success really be a thing?
September 11, 2008

An All Time Favorite

This film has been reviewed many times here so I won't recap the story elements but simply say that this is a wonderful, warm and moving film that I will watch again many times! July 24, 2008

On "Socialist" Lies

Some things are painful in life. As a life-long anti-Stalinist, pro-socialist militant the demise of the Democratic Republic of Germany and its theory of "socialism in half a country" and later, on its heels, the demise of the Soviet Union and its theory of "socialism in one country" were nevertheless social disasters of historic proportions for me. One result is that we live in the age of the one superpower world dominated by the United States and its genuine capacity for making trouble, militarily unchecked by any other power. Friends there is nothing good about that. Witness Iraq and many other hot spots in the world.

But enough of that because, despite my obvious different political take on what happened in East Germany in late 1989 and early 1990, this film Good Bye, Lenin is a very interesting view on what happened to one fictionalized family of mixed political and social sensibilities during that period. The film has been advertised as a comedy, and although there are some funny moments like the various attempts by some of the characters, including the main character son Alex, to create alternate social universes, there is more than a hint of satire (and sometimes localized `insider' satire) here. And satire is a very precious commodity in an age where everything is taken literally, whether it should be or not. Thus, a good prescription is -fight hard for your politics but take a minute to see humor in the sometimes absurd ways of this wicked old world.

The device used to create the central plot in this film has a long pedigree, although I believe that it might be the first time that it has been used in an attempt to preserve socialist reality. Quickly outlined, a son (the previously mentioned Alex) attempts, almost manically at times, to create "socialism in one bedroom" for his ailing mother who upon awaking in 1990 after eight months from a coma induced by a heart attack after witnessing him being beaten by the Statsi needs to, on doctor's advise, avoid any `excitement' on pains of relapse (and possible death). The dramatic tension revolves around an ever-widening and bizarre conspiracy (including drawing in his skeptical Russian girlfriend, his sister, her boyfriend, the neighbors, former colleagues, etc.) to keep mom in the dark about everything that has gone on during that time.

A subplot, however, reveals that Mom, in need of illusions as she might be, has secrets of her own in relationship to the whereabouts of her husband who left for West Germany in the past without his family, mainly because she balked at going for her own reasons. There are, additionally, many sight gags or things that pass for sight gags in a society that had a very limited exposure to the `virtues' of Western consumer society. But enough said, get this film if you want a very smart look at what happens when cultural changes come fast and furious. Not everyone can, or should, adjust accordingly. But also get it, if I may add, so that you can begin to understand why mother wanted to stick with the old socialist ways, as she understood that concept. And maybe fight for them, as well.
July 21, 2008

WOLFGANG BECKER, OPUS 4

***** 2003. Co-written and directed by Wolfgang Becker. Six European Film awards. A few months before the fall of the Berlin wall, Alex's mother suffers from a heart attack and falls into coma. When she wakes up months later, her family fears that she won't be able to face the new political reality. Instructive, poignant and fascinating, GOOD BYE, LENIN! deserves all the international awards it earned 5 years ago. Masterpiece. May 2, 2008

An honest film about lying

Although marketed as an all-out comedy, Goodbye, Lenin! is in many ways more of a feelgood tragicomedy about the nature of lies rather than a laugh-a-minute sidesplitter. Certainly the premise has all the makings of farce as East German Daniel Bruhle has to go to increasingly desperate lengths to keep the news that communism and the Berlin Wall have both fallen from his Party activist mother when she emerges from a coma for fear the shock will cause a fatal heart attack. Since the pace of change to Western values and fashions has been so rapid that means finding their apartment's long discarded drab furniture, seeking out now discontinued East German brands of pickles and coffee and even faking DDR news reports with his fellow satellite TV installer as he tries to recreate the old East Germany within the borders of his mother's bedroom (not so easy with Coca Cola setting up shop just across the road), in the process gradually creating the more reasonable DDR he wished had existed. The laughs are there but less frequent than you'd expect, and often underlined with the sadness of a country suddenly forced to confront years of deprivation and betrayal: his sister's revelation of the first words their long-absent father spoke to her is initially funny but genuinely tragic on reflection, and the film manages to pull off both reactions without over-milking them. Nor does it sugar-coat the ending, opting for something rather more affecting than a simple Happy Ever After. Chalk up another quiet winner for the 21st Century German film industry Renaissance.
January 23, 2008

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