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Good Bye Lenin!
2003 Comedy / Drama
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Credits
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Director: Wolfgang Becker
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Script: Wolfgang Becker, Bernd Lichtenberg
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Photo: Martin Kukula
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Music: Yann Tiersen, Wolfgang Richter
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Cast: Daniel Brühl (Alex),
Katrin Sass (Mutter (Christiane Kerner)),
Chulpan Khamatova (Lara),
Maria Simon (Ariane Kerner),
Florian Lukas (Denis),
Alexander Beyer (Rainer),
Burghart Klaußner (Alex' Vater),
Michael Gwisdek (Klapprath),
Christine Schorn (Frau Schäfer),
Jürgen Holtz (Herr Ganske),
Jochen Stern (Herr Mehlert),
Stefan Walz (Sigmund Jähn),
Eberhard Kirchberg (Dr Wagner)
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Country: Germany
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Language: German
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Runtime: 121 min
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Aka: Goodbye Lenin!
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Summary
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?
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.
© James Travers 2006
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