It's 1989 and Germany is still a nation divided. After her husband leaves her for a better life in West Germany, Christiane (Katrin Sass) finds herself married to her father land (East Germany).In the days leading up to Germany's unification, Christiane suffers a heart attack after witnessing her son Alex (Daniel Brühl) marching in an anti-communist demonstration. Slipping into a coma, Christiane sleeps through the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the introduction of capitalism.
When she wakes eight months later, Capitalism has triumphed by saturating Germany with a globalised ethos. Even her family has embraced the West: Alex has now got a job installing satellite dishes, and daughter Ariane (Maria Simon) is working for Burger King. During Christiane's big sleep, the drab familiarity of communist DDR had been replaced by garish brandscapes, material folly and new Westernised ideals of progress. Fearing his mother's fragile health will not survive Germany's unification, Alex re-furnishes the family apartment with the bland communist aesthetic of the former DDR. So meticulous is Alex's fabrication that, upon returning home, Christiane happily remarks that nothing has changed.
In Good Bye, Lenin! the world is awakened to new possibilities but Alex forces a social blindness on his mother albeit with the right intentions believing she will survive if her politics can continue unchanged. If Christiane hadn't suffered a heart attack after witnessing Alex's oppositional politics in action, the collapse of the Berlin Wall would have sent her health packing anyway. And so, the fantasy of sleeping through major world-changing events offers numerous tragicomic possibilities. Let’s say for argument sake that the same happened to a World Trade Centre employee, would his family send him to work or tell him of the nightmare?
Initially Alex's charade presents few challenges. He installs a hidden VCR that plays back old news footage and empties new imported foods into jars found in the trash. When mom spies a Coca-Cola billboard from her window, Alex enlists budding filmmaker Denis (Florian Lukas) to produce a farfetched news story -- complete with phony news anchor and video footage -- to explain its emergence. Alex becomes his own propaganda machine, spinning the kinds of lies that he once rallied against. It’s certainly a very interesting premise for a film in my view.
Alex soon discovers that there’s more to history than archival news footage and old pickle jars.The attitudes once forced upon the former DDR are changing fast, making it harder to locate people willing to perpetuate his regressive masquerade. On Christiane's birthday, Alex convinces some of her friends to join him in the lie. Even Alex's new girlfriend Lara (Chulpan Khamatova) plays along for a while. But when he starts inventing idealistic backstories for Lara and his sister's dopey boyfriend Rainer (Alexander Beyer), the lie spirals out of control, alienating him from his family and friends.
Alex's desire to help his mother at all costs makes the premise of Good Bye, Lenin! heartfelt and bittersweet. For me, it celebrates a love often not seen on a cinema screen, that of a boy’s love for his Mother. But the lie can only be sustained through the accumulation of others. After a while, it feels as if the plot exceeds its logical limits, becoming nonsensical despite its best melodramatic intentions. Whilst it may have been reasonably funny, it only served to tie itself up in knots a little bit.
Becker certainly knows how to elicit finely tuned dramatic performances from his cast but when it comes to comedy, the director takes the joke too far, relying on reductive slapstick tricks like fast motion. The most effective comic moments pay tribute to pop culture signs and corporate branding. Recurring Coca-Cola and Burger King trademarks wittily acknowledge how even digs at consumerism must inevitably grant it centre stage.
The scene when Ariane begins her Burger King tenure is staged exactly like a cheesy TV commercial, in effect halting the narrative flow as if cinema intermission has been announced. In The Truman Show, Meryl (Laura Linney) similarly interrupts the diegesis to offer homemaking tips. If that movie satirises our desire to be immersed in the global image stream, then Good Bye, Lenin! demonstrates how an effective critique of globalisation depends on acknowledging its omnipresence, no matter our desire.
Overall, I would recommend this film whole heartedly and think people should see it. It has a lovely premise and as I mention earlier a love often not celebrated in film is presented here so lovingly. It may have one or two flaw but overall it’s an engaging and ultimately rewarding drama. It should strike a chord with a lot of people as I’m sure all of us at some stage have tried to protect someone for some reason or other.
No comments:
Post a Comment