Good Bye Lenin! (2003)

Good bye, Lenin! (2003): *** out of ****

Directed by Wolfgang Becker. Screenplay by Wolfgang Becker and Bernd

Lichtenberg. Starring Daniel Brühl, Katrin Saß, Chulpan Khamatova, Maria Simon

and Florian Lukas.

by Andy Keast

One of my earliest memories from childhood is of me in my elementary school's

library, flipping through the *1986 World Almanac.* My favorite part of the

book was a panel section that featured the flags of all the nations of the

world, and I distinctly remember seeing those of East and West Germany.

Growing up I was taught that there were two separate Germanys, though near the

turn of the decade they had gone back to being one. "Good bye, Lenin!" is

about that transition by way of slapstick and a family crisis. The film avoids

being tiresome by (smartly) keeping its politics at a minimum, since it's more

interested in the characters. 

Alex (Daniel Brühl) is a boy living in East Germany with his GDR-devotee

mother, Christine (Katrin Saß) and sister Ariane (Maria Simon). He's young and

idealistic, and it's at a political demonstration that he meets his Russian

girlfriend Lara (Chulpan Khamatova). One night in 1989, Christine sees her son

being arrested at a rally. Being a dutiful believer in Communism, she faints

right there on the spot, shocked at how her son could engage in such deviance.

She not only faints but falls into a coma for several months.

Meanwhile, the Soviet bloc collapses, the Berlin Wall is demolished and

Communism falls forever. When Alex's mother comes out of her coma, doctors

warn the family that even the "slightest bit of change or excitement" could

cause her to slip away again. Alex enlists the help of an audio/visual

technician friend (Florian Lukas) to recreate East Germany of the late 1980s

-at least only in Christine's immediate surroundings, retrieving old Communist

paraphernalia and fabricating news broadcasts. Alex lies not because of trendy

idealism or pride or politics. He just wants to make the matriarch happy.

If this makes it sound a little bit like Zhang Yimou's "Xingfu shiguang," I

thought of that too. "Good bye, Lenin!" is a much more accessible film, at

least, I would guess, to Western audiences: the director, Wolfgang Becker, uses

familiar motifs from "A Clockwork Orange" and the German kids show "Das

Sandmännchen." There is some irony in how the film depends on a westernized

sense of humor for its effect (though the film does play fair by making fun of

westernization itself as well) -note the sequence where Adriane gets her first

job in the new Germany at a Burger King. If Milan Kundera had been a director

who grew up on the Marx brothers, this would be right up his alley.

==========
X-RAMR-ID: 37815
X-Language: en
X-RT-ReviewID: 1282399
X-RT-TitleID: 1129584
X-RT-AuthorID: 9883
X-RT-RatingText: 3/4