Goodbye, Lenin

The drive to protect a loved one from a difficult reality is a basic and very human one.
Writer/director Wolfgang Becker has used this basic impulse as the springboard to create his quirky, uninhibited and entertaining film, ‘Goodbye, Lenin’.

In ‘Goodbye, Lenin’ a young East Berliner Alex takes on the protector’s role. His mum had a heart attack and has woken up after being in a coma for nine months. Whilst his mother, Christiane, has been asleep dramatic changes have taken place in the city. The Berlin Wall has collapsed and communism has fallen. Alex does not believe that his mother, an ardent communist, would be able to cope with the news.

What does Alex do?! He puts his mother up in a room in his house, and then does everything in his power to keep the world the same as she knew it.

Director Becker squeezes every plot angle out of this scenario. Alex does everything to hold up the illusion. He buys foods that have been imported and then wraps them in old communist produced labels. Alex arranges some of his mother’s old friends to visit and recite old songs. A mate of his produces fabricated socialist news bulletins for his mother to watch on television.

‘Goodbye, Lenin’ works on many different thematic levels. Here are just a few descriptions..…A rich comedy in the bizarre solutions Alex comes up with…A touching love story between a mother and his devoted son….One man’s desperate attempt to salvage the past.

This was a very political film. ‘Goodbye, Lenin’ showed East Germans having great difficulty coping with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and unappreciative of the freedom and opportunities that had become available. After all, Alex did spin the whooper to his mother that the changes his mother was seeing were the result of the German Democratic Republic offering political asylum to those fed up with capitalism. Quite a reversal!

Well directed by Wolfgang Becker and with good performances by the cast headed by Alexander Kerner as Daniel Bruhl, Goodbye, Lenin was a treat!