Film Notes: Goodbye Lenin!

I haven't enjoyed a film as much as Wolfgang Becker's "Goodbye Lenin!" for a very long time. The story itself hangs around the unlikely premise that an East German communist falls into a coma and misses the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fall of Honecker and the GDR and wakes up in a unifying capitalist Germany. The doctors warn her family that any major shock could kill her - so they set about recreating the old East Germany in her apartment, unleashing an escalating and ludicrous sequence of events in a bid to maintain the pretence, which encompasses friends, neighbours, and colleagues!

The film is brilliant because it works in two ways. The plot is pure farce, and there are many laughs not least when the son Alex sets about producing fake old-style programmes to allow his mother to watch TV. On the other hand, the human emotions, family and relationship dynamics, and serious emotional pull of the acting, is convincing and moving in a way that is wonderfully un-farcical!

In one brilliant scene, the mother rises from her sick bed and staggers out into the streets to be confronted with a helicopter taking away a huge Lenin statue, which flies low past her - his outstretched arm beckoning her from the past, even as he is airlifted away! As the story unfolds, it transpires that several of the characters have also told lies with the best of intentions which have lead to whole swathes of untruths being told to substantiate them. This is all layered on the conflicting emotions the East Germans felt, as liberation was gained on one hand, but humiliation accepted on the other.

This film cleverly welds together personal emotions and big political events so that the 'lying to preserve the system' theme is practised by states and individuals alike; nostalgia for a semi-mythical lost golden age works both in the home and in the post-unification East Berlin as it lost so much employment, industry and its currency. Funny, heart-warming, witty, thoughtful and most unusual - this was two hours of excellent entertainment.

(German with English subtitles, cert 15 - presumably because of some of the language)