Good bye, Lenin! 

  

Directed by Wolfgang Becker

 

Written by Wolfgang Becker, Hendrik Handloegten, Bernd Lichtenberg, Christoph Silber. Achim von Borries

 

Starring:  Daniel Brühl, Kathrin Sass, Chulpan Khamatova and Maria Simon

 

Rated R for brief language and sexuality (very brief)

121 minutes runtime

USA Release February 27, 2004

German with English sub-titles

 

This sweet tragi-comedy is set in East Germany in 1989, the time of the fall of the Berlin wall.  Daniel Brühl stars as Alex Kerner, a young man saddled with the unenviable task of making time stand still in Berlin when the great wall came tumbling down.  He also has the intimidating task of making the audience take this movie seriously, instead of writing it off as insignificant fluff.  In fact, he succeeds on both fronts with a little help from his friends.  His friends include his mother, Christiane (played by Kathrin Sass), his new found love Lara (Chulpan Khamatova) and Denis (Florian Lukas) his whacko co-worker and movie-maker wannabe who helps him turn back the hands of time with some very funny media magic.

 

In a showing reminiscent of Brendan Fraser’s great performance as Adam Webber in “Blast From the Past,” Alex Kerner starts off as a young man very much ensconced on the east side of the cold war.  Whereas Brendon Fraser’s screen family is headed by a nutty scientist who builds the fall-out shelter to end all shelters, Brühl’s mother embraces socialism with a fury.  All the more so after her husband abandons the fatherland for greener pastures in the west.  His leaving is a shock not only to her self image as a woman, but also to her politics, and it’s hard to tell which is the strongest.  Acting out this trauma, Kathrin Sass does little in the first part of the movie except go into a deep depression, followed by treatment and then followed by an even deeper coma induced by a heart attack.  But she more than makes up for it in the end, when she awakes from the coma in a brave new world of Coca Cola and BMW’s.

 

Like Adam Webber in “Blast,” the responsibility falls on Alex to deal with the aftermath of his parent’s fanaticism.  Whereas it is Adam’s responsibility to go out and explore the new world that has erupted after 20 years of his family’s isolation, Alex’s responsibility is exactly the opposite.  He must make sure that his mother knows nothing of the fall of the socialist empire that occurred during her sleep.  If she finds out, she might die of a heart attack from the shock.  Or so the story goes.

 

All the players go on to admirable performances, save the audience from what could have been an “Ozzie and Harriet” experience and create one the most likeable films showing.  Erasing all signs of something as major as the fall of the soviet empire is not easy.  Alex starts by restoring his mother’s room to the same chintzy décor as is was at the time of her heat attack.  But Mom gains strength and starts to look around, and ask about the TV.  Fortunately, as a result of the westernization of East Germany, Alex has found a new job selling and  installing satellite dishes.  In a well done portrait of east-meets-west hucksterism, he and his new-found sales partner, Denis, have the dishes springing up from more balconies than you can shake a Malboro at.  In fact, as the dishes go up, the statues of Lenin come down.  Forging swords into market-shares, if you will.  Alex conspires with his co-worker Denis and gets the aspiring movie-maker to produce a series of fake news broadcasts that Alex plays on his home TV via a VCR.  In this way he keeps his mother’s illusion intact for a little while longer.  But cracks begins to appear in the wall, literally, as his mother gains enough strength to leave the house and starts to see things that are very hard to explain.

 

Florian Lukas’ performance of Denis, the west-crazed post-socialist Hollywood wannabe, is filled with all the myths and dreams that the silver screen promotes today.  He is so enthralled with the world of cinema that he is all too happy to make up a new world for Alex.  So they are both drawn into a world of make-believe, for the good of Christina, of course.  The tenuous security of the fantasy is shaken by Alex’ new found soul mate Lara (Chulpan Khamatova), who knows a scam when she sees one.  She not only saw the falsehoods of the socialist fantasy, but she sees the lies of this one, too.  To Lara it’s all the same lie--as phony now as it was then, and there is no way to make it right.  Alex begs her to hold off telling Christina the truth, but the structure of his make-believe world starts to groan under the pressure of too many changes, happening too fast.  Ain’t it the truth.

 

A most fetching performance by Daniel Brühl who acts like the German equivalent of Toby Maguire and Brendan Fraser put together.  His style has a sense of perplexed grace and deep-seated dedication and loyalty that makes a very genuine and winning combination.  You just can’t stop rooting for him.  He has won at least two “Best Actor” awards in Europe, one for this film and one previous, and may be headed for some awards in America as well.  The performance by his sidekick Denis is also great, as are the jobs done by Maria Simon, as his sister Ariane, and Alexander Beyer as her goof-ball husband Rainer, who manages a Burger King and embraces everything Western, no matter how corny.

 

In the end, we find out that Alex’ mom was keeping some secrets of her own, for reasons of her own, and at the expense of her son and daughter.  She had allowed the propaganda of the socialist dream invade the primacy of her feeling for her family.  It takes a taxi-cab driver playing the part of a former Russian cosmonaut, and Alex’ father returning to say goodbye to his former wife, to set things straight.  Set in the context of rapidly changing political times, the message of the movie is that the family unit must stay supreme.  The ties of blood are sacred and can not be subjugated to politics.  And in the end the truth conquers all.  The R rating is for some nudity that is practically non-existent.  There is no significant violence.