Good Bye Lenin! (2003)
Directed by Wolfgang Becker

Film Review

Acclaimed German film director Wolfgang Becker achieved an extraordinary success with this engaging comedy-drama, which shows the fallacy of trying to live in the past through a very touching story.  Good Bye Lenin! won six awards (including one for Best Film) at the European Film Academy and was a massive box office hit in Germany, enjoying similar success abroad.  It is most probably the most successful film ever to have been made in Germany.

Good Bye Lenin! is an utterly charming film, which combines moments of great tenderness with sublime laugh-out-loud comedy.  Wolfgang Becker has a distinctive, even quirky, cinematic style, which allows him to get away with using fast-motion shots to give the impression of a country undergoing change at a breakneck pace.  A more effective use of metaphor is how the division and subsequent reunification of Germany is contrasted with the brutal separation and ultimate reunion of Alex with his father.  Alex's obsession with space exploration (perhaps the only real achievement of the Communist regime) is also an effective plot device.  Not only does it make his character more plausible (he's a dreamer with the imagination to conceive a remarkable deceit), but it allows us to see the world from his perspective.  As a boy, he was taken in by the success of the space missions; years later, whilst watching a children's cartoon, he seems to realise that it was en empty dream - yet a dream he feels compelled to perpetuate to save his mother's life.

The star of Good Bye Lenin! is Daniel Brühl, the actor who plays Alex with great emotional feeling, depth and humanity.  His cherubin face accentuates his character's child-like naivety.  Alex's reluctance to let go of the past isn't just about saving his mother's life.  It's what he also needs: an emotional blanket to ease the pains of growing up and becoming a man.  The absence of his father has been compensated for by a belief in the past, perhaps in the Communist ideal.  While Alex clearly wants to move forward, whilst he sees the advantages that western liberalism offers him as an individual, the notion of a comfortable past under the Red Flag still holds him back.  Brühl conveys this dual-aspect of his character brilliantly.  Alex's self-delusion and idiotic stubbornness makes him appear absurdly comical in places, but Brühl succeeds in making him credible and rather endearing.

What is particularly satisfying about Good Bye Lenin! is that it revisits the past without becoming overwhelmed by it.  This is not a history lesson but it does provide an interesting account of how people underwent the transition from Communism to western-style democracy.  The truth is that most East Europeans were glad to see the back of Communist dictatorship and would never want to go back there.  The western capitalist model swept away the old system almost overnight - hence Alex's hilarious struggle to find anything belonging to the old regime when his mother comes to eight months after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Yet it's a much bigger film than that.  It's about human beings living with change, unable to let the past go yet relishing what the future offers.  Above all, it's a touching human drama, a story told with great sensitivity and insight, and all with an unflagging, unbridled sense of fun.

Film Synopsis

East Germany, 1989.  A young TV repairman, Alex, is taking part in a demonstration when he sees his mother collapse in the street.  Although she survives a near-fatal heart attack, she remains in a coma for eight months.  When she regains consciousness, the doctors advise Alex that the slightest shock could kill her.  By this time, the Berlin Wall has fallen, the German Democratic Republic has been swept away and Germany is on the brink of reunification.  Realising how much the old socialist ideal meant to his mother, Alex decides to take her home and do all he can to maintain the illusion that the GDR still exists, that nothing has changed.  It means he has to scour the shops for old East German pickles and conceal the fact that his sister now works for Burger King.  When his mother asks if she can watch television, Alex enlists a friend, a would-be filmmaker, to supply him with tapes of old GDR programmes and fabricated news reports.  For how long can Alex keep up this deception?