Good Bye, Lenin!
What would you do for your mother? You'd do anything, of course. That's part of the trade-off: You get to be born, she gets to be driven to the flower show or the church or the methadone clinic for as long as she wants. But would you sacrifice history if it would make mom happy? Freedom? Your own country?
That's the gem of the germ behind Wolfgang Becker's "Good Bye, Lenin!," a German comedy that teeters between farce and a regretful sigh. The film has been a big success in its home country, where its comic musings on the Cold War have tapped into a larger nostalgia for life in vanished East Germany, but US audiences don't have to know from "ostalgie" to relate to the movie's soulful humor. "Good Bye, Lenin!" is one of the most enjoyable movies I've seen lately, but it has a biting knowledge of that which history gives and history takes away.
The film opens in the summer of 1978, when Germany is still two countries, the Wall bisects Berlin, and change seems impossible. A father disappears through the Iron Curtain to live with his "new enemy-of-the-state girlfriend," and his two children watch their mother crumble into depression and then emerge a newly-committed warrior of the socialist state. Cut to October 1989: Mom Christiane (Katrin Sass) still has that old-bloc religion but her disaffected 20-something kids, Alex (Daniel Bruhl) and Ariane (Maria Simon), have nothing but contempt for their Communist rulers.
One night Alex joins a protest march -- "some evening exercise," he says, "for the right to take a walk without the Wall getting in the way," and his mother witnesses the ensuing riot, has a heart attack, and drifts into a coma. When she wakes up eight months later, the Wall is gone, the secret police are gone, East Germany is gone. The reunified halves of the country dance tentatively around each other as deutsch marks and Western goods stream into East Berlin.
Here's the catch: Christiane's heart is still so weak, warn her doctors, that the slightest excitement could kill her. What's a son to do, then, if the world his mother knows no longer exists? Simple: recreate it for her.
And so Alex de-renovates their apartment to its original drab decor and forces his sister back into her klunky Communist-era clothes. He goes dumpster-diving for pre-reunification pickle jars and closes the sick-room drapes against the invasion of capitalism. By this point his eyes are bugging from the exertions of nonstop lying. Then mom wants to watch the news on TV . . .
The spiral of complications goes faster and higher, Alex rushing about in increasingly frenzied attempts to plug the leaks in his mother's awareness. Some of this is just silly: When Alex remakes the apartment, Becker speeds up the action and cues "The William Tell Overture," and it doesn't matter whether he's making fun of a cliche or just giving in to it.
But for most of its running time, "Good Bye, Lenin!" beautifully mixes comedy, sentimentality, and cynicism. The performances are precisely calibrated by actors who have been there (Sass was a star of East German cinema in the 1980s), and Becker and screenwriter Bernd Lichtenberg convey the mixed emotions of people watching their lives change for the better but stranger.
Most striking is the film's acid love-hate relationship with the glitzy seductions of Western culture. Will you have fries with your freedom, "Lenin" pointedly asks, and then answers the question by having Alex build a kinder, more flexible socialist state -- one that starts in his mother's bedroom and expands to take in his Russian girlfriend (Chulpan Khamatova), his partner in satellite-dish sales (Florian Lukas), and a former East German astronaut (Stefan Walz). Alex arranges a version not of "This Is Your Life," but "This Could Have Been Our Lives." And he does it all for mother, until he starts doing it for himself.
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