Review: Good bye, Lenin! (***)

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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