Elemental Movies

Movie: Goodbye Lenin

 

When you think about countries producing blockbusters Germany doesn´t  come to mind. Occasionally good films are made, but not many capture the attention of foreign audiences. And then ´Good Bye, Lenin´ comes along, a small, low-budget film in which no alien creatures threaten the life on the planet, no Germanic terminator superstar saves the universe and not only the Germans are enthusiastic. Up to now more than 6.3 million Germans have seen the film making it the German film with the best start ever, it has been sold to 65 countries, already more than 1 million foreigners have seen it.  It has swept up the ´Lola´, the German Oscar,  three actors have won a Bambi, it was awarded the best European film of the year and l represented Germany in Hollywood in 2004 in the Oscar competition for the best foreign film.

Foreigners see a wonderful film which is rightly praised to the skies, but Germans see much more in it, first I’d like to present the film you can see and then tell you what makes it so special for us.

The plot is simple: a loving son tries to move mountains and create miracles to help his ailing mother become well again. Sounds simple, but in what kind of story this has been packed! A single mother lives with her son, Alex, and her daughter Ariane in Berlin, the capital of the GDR (German Democratic Republic), her husband has defected to West Germany because of another woman – or so she tells her children. Later she confesses to have lied to them because she herself can´t bear the truth. She isn´t interested in finding a new partner and throws herself body and soul into party work.

The story proper begins in October 1989 when the GDR is in its terminal stage, political demonstrations take place nearly daily. Alex, now 21 years old, is among those who take to the streets. One day when his mother is on her way to the Palace of the Republic for a festive meeting he is in a demonstration which is broken up by the police, the taxi can´t take her to her destination because the streets are blocked, she gets out and sees her son being hauled into a police truck. She faints, falls into a coma and is taken to hospital. What a coincidence, yes, indeed, but the film has to start somehow and then there is a fairy tale element in the whole story.

Eight months later she awakens and can be taken home, but her heart is so weak that any shock might kill her and shocks there are in abundance: the Wall has come down, the GDR doesn´t exist any more, capitalism is triumphing! What to do? Alex and Ariane transform the flat back into its former humble (socialist) state and give their mother the impression that her beloved GDR is still intact and flourishing.  Things don´t look too bad at first, when she wants to listen to the radio they tell her that it is broken, but when she gets better and insists on watching TV,  they have to think of something. Fortunately (coincidence again!) Alex is a TV technician with a talented friend (Denis), they make up the daily news praising the achievements of communism in a studio and put the cassettes into the telly. The convalescent is getting better and better and one day, when she is alone at home she gets up, leaves her sick room and steps out of the house into a completely transformed city. How do they explain the many Wessies (people from West Germany), the many cars, the house high ads for Coca Cola without risking her imminent death? Go and watch for yourselves!

When we Germans see the film, we know at once where in the audience Ossies sit (Ossi [pronounced Oss-ee] = someone from East Germany), they groan, snigger, laugh out loud where Wessies don´t react at all or just smile. I´m a borderline case, I lived in the GDR for the first 11 years of my life and later had constant with my relatives there. When I was at school it was not yet obligatory to be a member of the Young Pioneers, the children’s organisation of the Communist Party, but I was affected. The best pupils got a badge from the Young Pioneers as a reward and as I always was among the best [sadly, this changed when I went to secondary school J] I got it, too, they didn’t have any others!

I’d like to pick out one scene: Alex falls in love with the Russian nurse Lara, serious house shortage was one of the many problems in the GDR, so where could the lovers go? The girl gets the address of a flat whose occupants have fled to the West leaving everything, and that is everything behind, the flat looks as if they´d just gone out to the pictures and may return every moment. My mother and I did just that, only that the moment our train was leaving Dresden, my grandmother arrived with a van and took all our possessions to a store room before the neighbours could inform the police. I´m sure a woman I spoke to the other day could´t watch this scene without crying, she left the GDR with only a suitcase via Hungary three months before the collapse, had she waited a bit longer she wouldn´t have had to start a new life in West Germany from scratch.

Alex can´t believe his luck, he finds a kitchen full of food. To make his mother believe the GDR is still alive he has to feed her with GDR products, but where to get them? One of the first things was that all the shops were emptied of the GDR goods and filled with the goods the Ossies had longed for for 40 years. Can you imagine that they had never had bananas, oranges, lemons, pineapples? Thought so, you can´t. Without their garden plots the population would have suffered severely from scurvy. And the goods there were couldn´t even be got regularly, Vitamin B was necessary, B standing for Beziehungen (connections), i.e., you scratch my back, I´ll scratch yours. Knowing all this the joy Alex´ mother feels when she gets a basket full of ordinary food stuff for her birthday becomes understandable. When she takes the things out and reads the labels the Ossies int the audience can´t but comment.

A new word has been coined, Ostalgie, East German nostalgia for the past. How´s that? Aren´t all Ossies happy to have been liberated? Can you imagine to be told that 40 years of your life, that everything you had learnt, got used to and liked and also loved (why not?) was wrong, an illusion at best? Again, you can´t, I can´t, either.

The director, Wolfgang Becker, a Wessie, btw, with no personal connections to the GDR  is overwhelmed by the success of his film, he hadn´t intended to hit a nerve, but he has.

Cast:

Daniel Brühl (Alex)

Katrin Saß (Mother)

 Chulpan Khamatova (Lara),

Maria Simon (Ariane)

Florian Lukas (Denis)

Burghart Klaussner (Father)

__________________

Bernd Lichtenberg (author)

Stefan Arndt (producer)

Yann Tiersen (music)

120 min.

genre: comedy

from 6 years onwards

Tara Perry aka The Movie Maven talks upcoming releases Case 39, Let Me In and The Social Network. Follow Tara on Twitter: twitter.com
Video Rating: 4 / 5