Film: Ich bin ein Wallbuster

Good Bye Lenin!

By Anthony Allison

So where were you, Nov. 9, 1989? What were you doing the day the Iron Curtain cracked as the first chunks of Berlin Wall concrete came tumbling down? How did you spend the heady months that followed, as repressive regimes tottered and the huddled Eastern European masses gleefully embraced liberty, the materialist life and the pursuit of profit?

What if, like some Rip Van Winkle of the Cold War, you slept through the whole amazing transformation?

That's the intriguing premise of Good Bye Lenin! But director Wolfgang Becker and co-writer Bernd Lichtenberg use it merely as the launch pad for a delightful flight of fancy that judiciously weaves drama and farce, historical realism and wistful nostalgia, biting social satire and touching romance into a thoughtful riff on German reunification.

After a flashback revealing how idealistic East German hausfrau Christiane Kerner (Katrin Sass) raised her two children alone after her husband fled to the West, the action shifts to Oct. 7, 1989. As the staunch socialist prepares to celebrate East Germany's 40th birthday, she suffers a heart attack that renders her comatose.

When she wakes eight months later, son Alex (Daniel BrŸhl) heeds her doctor's warning that the slightest shock--like the news of the tumultuous political changes--might kill her. So he restores the family apartment to its drab, Cold War state, and confines his bedridden parent to her room.

This simple deception, of course, soon becomes complicated. Alex desperately searches for Mom's favorite pickles, no longer available in supermarkets bristling with imported Western foodstuffs. He enlists co-worker Denis (Florian Lukas), a satellite dish installer and wannabe Kubrick, to concoct bogus videotape newscasts that plausibly explain such incongruities as a Coca-Cola banner on a neighboring building. Meanwhile, Alex's sister Ariane (Maria Simon) not only consorts with the former class enemy, West German burger joint boss Rainer (Alexander Beyer), but has his baby.

Sass is wonderfully affecting as the seemingly steel-strong matriarch whose nurturing instincts find expression in teaching, but whose tireless political activism conceals a guilty secret.

BrŸhl makes Alex a charmingly bumbling hero who ultimately finds redemption not only in his mother's love, but also in that of her young, Russian nurse, Lara (Chulpan Khamatova). He's aided considerably by a script that, shades of October Sky, frames its story with Alex's childhood memory of the memorable 1978 day when East German cosmonaut Sigmund JŠhn became the first German in space--a space-race subplot that has a poignant payoff later.

Becker cannily balances predictable digs at Communist bloc technological prowess (Christiane is amazed when Alex says that after only three years on the waiting list for a Trabant, their new car is ready) by lampooning too the dubious delights of capitalism: East German oldsters grumble about losing their jobs and dignity and, by inference, the sense of community concomitant with being united against a common enemy.

Becker also tones down the more farcical elements of his scenario, going instead for the emotional jugular. As Germany heads toward reunification (in October 1990) and Alex and Araine learn the shocking truth about their estranged father (Burghart Klaussner), Alex's awkward reunion with him makes a touching, surprisingly non-heavy-handed metaphor for the reunification of a divided nation.

Meanwhile, his pal Denis' masterwork provides both a salutary lesson in how easily TV images can be manipulated into deceptive propaganda and a witty dig at Western consumer culture: "Not everyone wants careerism and spiraling consumption. ... These people [have] realized there's more to life than cars, VCRs and TV sets."

This fake broadcast sets up the film's ending, which not only resolves Alex's big lie but provides a refreshingly bittersweet conclusion to this real German gem.