Goodbye Lenin!
Goodbye Lenin! generated a lot of fuss in Germany, picking up a gaggle of nominations and awards for writer director Wolfgang Becker, and doing well at the box office.
Some of this interest is intertwined with the fate of East Germany, and is probably specific to German audiences. But the themes of loss and change are also universal, and the show has its engaging moments.
The story is set in East Germany in 1989. Daniel Bruhl plays a young man unhappy with the Communist regime, and out of tune with his mother’s unrelenting support of the regime’s bizarre socialist trappings.
But when his mother collapses into a coma, he’s full of remorse – and when she eventually wakes up, with a warning from the doctors that any sudden shock could kill her, he determines to recreate the now lost communist regime in her bedroom, as if the Berlin wall had never fallen.
This involves him and a mate making up news reports in the east German style, and going around scrounging some of the terrible food that was a feature of socialist eating (not to mention getting shocks when giant Coca Cola signs are unfurled outside the bedroom).
While the motivation for this behavior is a little thin, Becker has a lot of fun with nostalgia for east German pickles, as well as introducing us to some of the mothers friends, now lost in the new world of a united Germany.
The story goes on too long, as does the film, and it tends to meander towards the end. Becker introduces a trip to the west German side for his hero to meet his long lost father as a way of bolstering the third act, but it doesn’t really work, or convince, just as a trip to the holiday house begins to make you wonder just how tough life was for these east Germans.
But because it is a period piece, about a definitive moment in the life of east and west Germany, there’s more than nostalgia at work here, with the themes of change and a sense of loss intrinsic to all the characters. It would certainly help if you’d lived through the change in Germany, in order to appreciate the humor and the sharp images of communism versus capitalism – but scenes where Alex tries to cash in his mother’s old money for new will work well enough even if you don’t know the particulars of what went down.
There is more than a faint sense of yearning and loss for the ideals embedded in east German communism, no matter how hopelessly corrupt and secret police driven the regime became. References to the first German cosmonaut becoming a cab driver, or Alex’s sister dishing up hamburgers and Lenin’s monument being stolen away by a helicopter (shades of Fellini) suggest Becker is a little sentimental about east Berlin.
But this will only irritate extreme right wingers. Others will be able to console themselves that the fall of the regime was a good thing, but even the worst in the world can sometimes induce nostalgia as change makes us freefall through space. How else do you explain the cult of Mao memorabilia, much sought after by collectors in Chinese markets?
So while the result is German specific in many ways, and about a regime not really missed by anyone who doesn’t experience a craving for its pickles, it also provides an insight into current German travails, and that’s as much as you can expect or demand of an art house product. It takes you somewhere else, away from Hollywood and its monolithic world view, and that’s no bad thing …
Get free email now!
