GOOD BYE, LENIN!
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2004 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): ***
In GOOD BYE, LENIN!, a sweet and quirky tale, a young man named Alexander
Kerner (Daniel Brühl) creates an intricate fantasy world for Christiane
(Kathrin Sass), his dying mother, so as not to upset her and hasten her demise.
In the late 1970s, when Alexander was little, his father left the family's
East German home to flee the country in order to be with his "enemy of the
state girlfriend." Since then, the family, consisting of Alexander, his mother
and his sister, Ariane (Maria Simon), has lived together in their small
apartment. The mother is an award-winning and very active member of the East
German Socialist Party.
The story takes place mainly in 1990 eight months after the fall of the Berlin
wall, during the rapid reunification of Germany. Christiane has a heart attack
just after East Germany celebrates its fortieth anniversary and just days
before the fall of the wall. The attack puts her in coma. The body of the
story happens when she surprisingly awakes eight months after the wall has come
down.
In order to protect his fragile mother, who isn't expected to live more than a
few days -- she significantly exceeds expectations, Alexander, aided
reluctantly by his sister and her new husband from the West and his new Russian
girlfriend, Lara (Chulpan Khamatova), creates an increasingly elaborate ruse in
the family's apartment. Out go their new furniture and better food and
clothing and back come the old scabby socialist goods, which prove hard to
find. When his mother wants to watch TV, he even arranges for special fake
news programs to be produced by a buddy of his.
This is a dedicated son who does what he thinks his mother needs, even if it
keeps getting harder and harder to pull it off and even if the lies become more
complex and complicated. A huge Coca-Cola advertising banner outside his
mother's window is explained away by claiming that East Germany won an
international patent dispute, which proved that it was actually East German
scientists who invented the secret formula for Coke.
Eventually, Alexander has to come up with the biggest prevarication of all.
The meaning of wall's fall is turned upside down. As Alexander's revisionist
version of history tells it, the wall fell because the East Germans broke it
down in order to let in all of the unemployed Westerners who wanted to be part
of the East German Socialist utopia. Communism had finally fulfilled its dream
of triumphing over Capitalism.
Just when the movie seems to have run out of gas, it comes up with a touching
and surprising last act. In a movie in which I never expected to cry, I did a
bit.
GOOD BYE, LENIN! runs 2:01. The film is in German with English subtitles. It
is rated R for "brief language and sexuality" and would be acceptable for
teenagers.
The film is playing now in nationwide release in the United States. In the
Silicon Valley, it is showing at the Camera Cinemas.
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