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Good Bye, Lenin!
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Wolfgang Becker co-founded the production company X Filme in 1994. The stable is most famous for making films such as Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run, 1998), The Princess and the Warrior (2001), and Heidi M (2001). Becker started working in the film industry as a freelance cinematographer and won numerous awards for his features Kinderspiele (Child's Play, 1992) and Das Leben ist eine Baustelle (Life Is All You Get, 1996) which was in Competition at the Berlinale in 1997.What X Filme seem to be particularly good at is producing punchy stories that are embellished with humour, packaged in a style that is also palatable to the non-German market. Their films are glossy, slick versions of the prevailing trends in German cinema over the last five to ten years, light years away from from the heavy, plodding philosophising of Fassbinder and Herzog, which still seem to dominate the minds of most German distributors. Good Bye Lenin! starts with the East German riots of 1989. Alex's (Daniel Brühl) mother (Katrin Saß), a committed communist, is knocked down in the chaos and ends up in hospital in a coma. When she finally wakes up, East and West Germany have become one. Alex tries to shield her from the changes that Westernisation is bringing. He has been told that she should be spared any shocks if she is to get well again. Alex's efforts entail ever more complicated sub-plots; from decanting produce into old East German jars, to recreating East German news, by making it up and casting a friend as a typical Eastern-style newsreader. The resulting film is a panic-stricken race against time and outside forces. The difference between Eastern and Western culture is highlighted by consumables, décor, and ideals. There are a few moments of pathos, most strikingly when Alex finds his father and goes to meet him at his plush house in the West. The main focus however is an unrelenting satire of the East. Wolfang Becker's film has been competently, although not particularly imaginatively shot. Daniel Brühl, a rising star in German cinema, (he played the lead in Das Weisse Rauschen [White Noise], 2001) oozes charm and great comic timing. He is skilfully supported by the far more experienced Katrina Saß as his mother and Florian Lukas playing his best friend Denis. For many outside of Germany watching this film, it will be the first time that they will see what it really meant for East Germans when the wall came down. An entire nation was propelled forth at top speed into a culture of consume, consume, consume. Good Bye Lenin! uses this to maximum effect. It's a bit philosophical, a bit political, a bit funny, and a bit sentimental - in other words easily consumable and good for a laugh.
Reviewed by Elke de Wit
Reader comments about Good Bye, Lenin!
Chris (Email address withheld) writes:
WUNDERBAR! I had a great time. Laughter and tears, great actors, a wonderful story and a very talented director. More people in the UK will hopefully watch this film and correct our views on Germany today.
Paul (PaulCastro@postmaster.co.uk) writes:
I enjoyed Goodbye Lenin. Although it poked fun at many aspects of East German life, I’m not sure it was exactly an unrelenting parody of it, it was at turns too affectionate and too ambiguous for that. It showed, not in great detail, its not that sort of film, but with enough clarity to alert the viewer, the most negative aspects of the communist regime namely the repression. I also thought it showed that there is another side to history. East Germany, and by extension Communism, did have some positive points and that these should not be written out of history and that the coming of Capitalism is not the Second Coming. In a time when Western European Capitalism is busily erasing the traces of communism in the former Eastern bloc, through property speculation and rampant commercial expansion, I thought it did show that there were, and are, real, humanistic principles to socialism. The West can bring material comfort to the East, but these principles shouldn’t be entirely disconsidered in the construction of the future, in Berlin or elsewhere. OK, So far, so banal. At the same time I did think Goodbye Lenin was shot through with ambiguity in lots of though provoking ways, which nuanced this message. The possible underlying reasons for the mother’s fervent embrace of the communist programme we discover at the end, the way Alex full of good intentions recreates not just East German television, but a mini-version of its propaganda machine are good examples of this. Belief in Communism as an escape from personal unhappiness and maladjustment? Hmmm. The part of the story dealing with East Germany’s space programme was particularly enjoyable, not least because aesthetically I enjoy anything to do with Cosmonauts. On the one hand, as in the West, it was a fantastic tool for pro-Communist propaganda, but at the same time there was a palpable humanist impulse, which is threatened with extinction in the day-glo cut-throat West Berlin that pours over the border. The famous cosmonaut becoming a taxi-driver in westernised East Germany reworks an old cliché to show this in an efficient way. What was more interesting I thought was Alex’s relation to the space race. As a child, he immerses himself in the TV coverage of the space race to escape from his father’s defection and his parents ensuing break-up. As an idealist adolescent under the say of his mother, he joins in the young rocket engineers corps (I sure as hell would’ve…). A bright socialist future beckons. Cut to the future, and Alex is enjoying a roadie in front of his rationalist-nightmare housing block after a day of drudgery as a TV repair man. So Socialism doesn’t deliver (and only becomes in any way attractive for him in hindsight). Come western Capitalism, he ends up installing satellites broadcasting vacuous TV programmes. Not much hope in the middle of that. I hope his nurse girlfriend doesn’t get deported…
Michael Erlenberg (Email address withheld) writes:
Having seen the movie in Berlin several times, I asked what people thought the very essence of it was. Nobody said it's comedy what makes it worthwhile. And it was always a single scene they named as the core of Goodbye Lenin. It sums up perfectly why everybody (myself included, I was born in the GDR), perceives re-unification as a tremendous personal loss, too. This has never been achieved in any of the previous attempts in either literature or film on the subject.
This core scene is the one where some boys in the uniform of the GDR's kids' pioneer organisation, hired by Alex, sing at his mothers bedside. What they sing is this very well known and well-loved, as well as very often ridiculed song:
Our Home
Our home - that's not only the towns and villages,
our home - that's also all the trees in the forest,
our home - that's the the grass in the meadow, the grain in the field,
and the birds in the air,
and the beasts on the ground,
and the fish in the river - are home,
and we love home - the beautiful,
and we guard her, for she belongs to the people,
for she belongs to our people.
And the choir boys do really butcher the song, because it's notoriously difficult to sing. But when proficiently performed the song it a real work of art and guarateed to make everybody dewy-eyed.
This scene works on several planes at once:
a) The parallel between a simple, positive and beautiful song that is regularly ruined because of its difficulty, and the idea of communism is not lost on the audience.
b) "for she belongs to our people": The GDR wasn't a success by any standards, but it was, literally, ours: No private ownership of land, houses or means of production. This felt good, really.
c) "home" translates into two words in German, even when speaking about the same location: One that is about the place where you eat, sleep, live, and return to after work or from a vacation. And one that is about where you are born, long to return to from a war, or want to be buried. The song, as you may have guessed, is about the latter.
We learned that because our home (in the first meaning) was an intolerable place, we had to sacrifice our home (in the second meaning).
Beth E. (Email address withheld) writes:
It's a very touching, heartwarming movie with some very funny moments. I think Americans can learn a lot about the reunification in Germany from watching this. It's one of my favorite movies ever!
sling (Email address withheld) writes:
'Goodbye Lenin' is an extraordinary movie. It is sentimental and nostalgic, but never schumucky. The director Wolfgang Becker, shows this by filming most of the movie key scenes in 'the golden hour'- This lends the film a beautiful, haunting lyricism that plays beautifully with the ironically funny narration of Alex. For instance, the military parade is named as 'the parade of the one of the world's last great shooting clubs'.. and a march to destroy the wall as 'we were walking for the right to take evening walks without the wall getting in the way'.
The movie centres on Alex's obessesion which everyone around finds increasingly creepy. But we never find Alex's devotion to his mother creepy- increasingly, we are drawn into the small world he has created, for his mother, for the idealist in him who admits, that the Germany he created was what he would have liked it to have been.
Whereas anyone with small knowledge of Communist propaganda would have been sickened by any sentimentality of East Germany post-Berlin wall- the movie does not exactly glorify it.. it is just saying the ideal Germany has passed out of our consciousness to live in Christine when she dies, or in Alex's when he sees what Christine believes in.
The movie never says whether Christine realises she has been had, but the affectionate look she gave Alex while watching the 'news' seems to tell us, that she did. Isn't human love so strange, that we live for ideals we think the other believes in- and they vice versa?
The script for Good Bye, Lenin! took the EFA prize for best screenwriting. And indeed the script-writer deserves it. I have not watched a movie with such a rounded storyline and characters for a long time. The various subplots: the sister's estrangement with her mother, the missing father, the failed cosmonaut, all give us a indication of failed idealism of a people who were brought up to live lives of explemary perfectionism- as Ariane's boyfriend points out 'East germans love to complain, west germans, they don't care...'
'Goodbye Lenin' is a movie of beautiful conception that reveals to us flaws of love, such that we realise them to be that of uncommon beauty itself..
rain (kimie_rainkonen@yahoo.de) writes:
ich suche original script "goodbye lenin" auf deustch.
hilfe bitte.......
Elsie (Email address withheld) writes:
One of my favourite movies. Fresh, light with a captivating story that does not rely on sex and violence to hold the viewer's attention. The film works on a number of levels and humour is not once lost to plot. Clever, clever film.
10/10
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