Good Bye, Lenin! Review
by Andy Keast (arthistoryguy AT aol DOT com)May 19th, 2004
Good bye, Lenin! (2003): *** out of ****
Directed by Wolfgang Becker. Screenplay by Wolfgang Becker and Bernd Lichtenberg. Starring Daniel Brühl, Katrin Saß, Chulpan Khamatova, Maria Simon
and Florian Lukas.
by Andy Keast
One of my earliest memories from childhood is of me in my elementary school's library, flipping through the *1986 World Almanac.* My favorite part of the book was a panel section that featured the flags of all the nations of the world, and I distinctly remember seeing those of East and West Germany. Growing up I was taught that there were two separate Germanys, though near the turn of the decade they had gone back to being one. "Good bye, Lenin!" is about that transition by way of slapstick and a family crisis. The film avoids
being tiresome by (smartly) keeping its politics at a minimum, since it's more interested in the characters.
Alex (Daniel Brühl) is a boy living in East Germany with his GDR-devotee mother, Christine (Katrin Saß) and sister Ariane (Maria Simon). He's young and
idealistic, and it's at a political demonstration that he meets his Russian girlfriend Lara (Chulpan Khamatova). One night in 1989, Christine sees her son
being arrested at a rally. Being a dutiful believer in Communism, she faints right there on the spot, shocked at how her son could engage in such deviance.
She not only faints but falls into a coma for several months.
Meanwhile, the Soviet bloc collapses, the Berlin Wall is demolished and Communism falls forever. When Alex's mother comes out of her coma, doctors warn the family that even the "slightest bit of change or excitement" could cause her to slip away again. Alex enlists the help of an audio/visual technician friend (Florian Lukas) to recreate East Germany of the late 1980s -at least only in Christine's immediate surroundings, retrieving old Communist paraphernalia and fabricating news broadcasts. Alex lies not because of trendy
idealism or pride or politics. He just wants to make the matriarch happy.
If this makes it sound a little bit like Zhang Yimou's "Xingfu shiguang," I thought of that too. "Good bye, Lenin!" is a much more accessible film, at least, I would guess, to Western audiences: the director, Wolfgang Becker, uses
familiar motifs from "A Clockwork Orange" and the German kids show "Das Sandmännchen." There is some irony in how the film depends on a westernized sense of humor for its effect (though the film does play fair by making fun of westernization itself as well) -note the sequence where Adriane gets her first job in the new Germany at a Burger King. If Milan Kundera had been a director who grew up on the Marx brothers, this would be right up his alley.
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