Good Bye Lenin! (2003)

GOOD BYE LENIN! 

Reviewed by: Harvey S. Karten Grade: B+ Sony Pictures Classics Directed by: Wolfgang Becker Written by: Wolfgang Becker, Bernd Lichtenberg Cast: Daniel Bruhl, Katrin Sass, Maria Simon, Chulpan Khamatova, Florian Lukas, Alexander Beyer, Burghart Klaussner, Michael Gwisdek Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 1/6/04

If you're an American who was at least a teenager when America reached a cultural, political and social turning point in 1968, you're aware as are few young people today of the ways that life now is different from existence in the naive decade of the 1950's. Imagine, though, that as a modern Rip Van Winkle you went about your days in the fifties and early sixties, fell asleep in the mid-1960's, and woke up in, oh, 1973 to find that while not all that much had altered technologically, the movies had suddenly become so sexually explicit and the conversation of men and women so unusually saucy that you could scarcely imagine what was going on.

A similar renaissance occurred in Berlin at the close of the eighties. Divided since the end of World War 2 by a wall separating the Sovietized East and the pro-American West, an outpouring of demonstrations merged with the crumbling of the Soviet empire to tear down the wall and unite the great city for the first time in forty-five years. With socialism all but dead in the East, that area of the world is successfully invaded by capitalist influences ushering Coca-Cola together with the spirit of rat-race competition. While some, usually old-timers, mourned the death of their easy-going way of life with its guaranteed employment and pleasant if not opulent retirement benefits, the youth were as enthusiastic as the revelers at Woodstock for the opportunity to make their way into their first million.

Some middle-aged people, however, could not be expected to abide the changes. Wolfgang Becker, employing a script he wrote with Bernd Lictenberg, hones in on one family going through a crisis of its own. Handily mixing absurdist humor with drama and earned sentimentality, Becker evokes an astonishing performance by Katrin Sass as Christiane Kerner, an East Berliner who is a true believer in the socialist way of life, who leads choruses of Young Pioneers in songs celebrating the joys of a Marxist state, and who has nothing but contempt for the crass materialism that she presumes exists over the wall in the West.

Evoking an unusual theme never quite pursued in this way before. Becker puts Christiane Kerner in a predicament. Having suffered a heart attack while watching her son, Alexander (Daniel Bruhl), arrested by the police and thrown into a van, she goes into a coma for eight months, the doctor warning Alexander and his sister Ariane (Maria Simon) that any upsetting news to which she may be privy upon waking up could trigger a second, and probably fatal attack.

Realizing the danger of his mother's waking up to this new, wall-busting civilization that has swept aside the political system which has brought her great joy, Alexander conspires to alter the environment in such a way that Christiane, upon awakening, would never know that a societal transformation had taken place at all.

The fun comes from the various machinations pursued by young Alex to avoid disturbing his mom in any way. He pays a couple of 12-year-olds to come into the bedroom and sing a chorus of Young Pioneers songs as though such were still de rigeuer. He puts videotapes made by his coworker, an aspiring filmmaker into the TV, merging movietone-style clips showing the now-ousted East German leader acting as though he were still the country's chief honcho. When a huge Coca-Cola banner appears on a nearby building despite the fact that the drink had been banned in East Berlin, Alex convinces mom that an agreement was reached to allow the importation. Best of all, when East Berliners are joyfully leaping over the now-destroyed wall into the West, he assures Christiane that the reverse is happening: that Westerners, fed up with life in a rat race, are coming over to life in the East.

The film's major fault is its grainy quality, the sort of stock that you'd expect in a newsreel but which, like the current craze for digital substitution is anathema to satisfactory viewing. Happily "Good Bye Lenin!", which includes a surreal shot of the aforementioned Russian leader's statue being carted away by chopper (reminding us of a similar vision in the rarely-seen "Ulysses' Gaze"), is strengthened by sincere performances including an Oscar-worthy job by Frau Sass, and by its successful mix of humor, sentiment and politics.

Not Rated. 120 minutes.(c) 2004 by Harvey Karten at Harveycritic@cs.com

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X-RAMR-ID: 37115
X-Language: en
X-RT-ReviewID: 1253438
X-RT-TitleID: 1129584
X-RT-SourceID: 570
X-RT-AuthorID: 1123
X-RT-RatingText: B+