I don’t usually feel called to write film reviews because those I look up post-viewing tend to fulfill my need to absorb a deeper analysis, with Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian being my usual favourite. However all the reviews of Good Bye Lenin! that I’ve read seem to have missed the point; or at least the point that got communicated to me. (Incidentally I also don’t write reviews because I have a bad habit of appreciating most films, and criticism with sparsely bestowed praise is apparently more credible).
(Note: spoilers follow, I recommend watching the movie before reading my review)
Good Bye Lenin! is a wonderful German film by Wolfgang Becker. On the surface the premise generates some highly amusing comedy: an East German mother (Christiane) has a heart attack and slips into a coma shortly prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Upon awakening eight months later her son Alex is told that she should not be excited for fear she will suffer a second attack and die. Alex can’t see anything more likely to upset his fiercely patriotic mother than for her to learn of the tumultous events that have taken place whilst she was unconscious.
He proceeds to reconstruct the old GDR for bedridden Christiane through a series of farcical measures. He decants imported Western foods into Communist-era jars plundered from bins. Her bedroom is restored to its former dourness by retrieving discarded furniture from the basement of their tenament block. Together with his invaluable West German colleaugue Denis he constructs phony news reports, even explaining away the appearance of a Coca-Cola banner outside Christiane’s window through the brilliant ruse that Coca-Cola was actually invented in East Germany. The punchline is that this has now been conceded by the arch-capitalist corporation, and so the GDR has reciprocally embraced the Western brand. Becker doesn’t hold back in satirising the foibles of the distorted communism of the former Soviet bloc, and its own propensity to create illusions to pacify its people.
The satirical comedy is deftly interwoven with a bittersweet family drama. Above all, Becker depicts Alex’s love for his mother, a kind of love story that Bradshaw astutely points out is rarely seen in cinemas. The tragedy of Christiane’s separation from her husband is movingly added without sentimental lingering: he broke for the West and she was supposed to follow, but could not bring herself to embrace the risks involved. In a parallel but less benign piece of deception she has hidden his letters from her children and deceived them into believing he left for another woman. The family drama is all the more emotionally impactful for being an underlying thread, rarely dwelt upon for longer than is necessary. Some of the easiest comedy comes from Alex’s sister’s abandonment of college for a McJob with Burger King. The comedy again smoothly combines with deeply felt pathos when all she can find to say to her estranged father during a chance encounter at the drive-through is “‘Enjoy your meal and thank you for choosing Burger King.”
One of Becker’s clever touches, which at first struck me as an irritating anachronism, is that Denis wears a Matrix-style T-shirt, some 7 years prior to that film’s release. Cycling home from the cinema I decided that this was deliberate – a Brechtian touch of alienation that reminds us that the film itself, like its subject matter, is a delightful illusion. The reference to the Matrix of course also evokes the darker side of deception and delusory worlds. IMDB’s goofs page has a different interpretation, so maybe I’m seeing more here than was intended.
The deeper point of the film, in my opinion, is that the construction of this facade is as much for Alex’s benefit as his mother’s. Alex is imagining the future East Germany that he’d have wanted; he says as much in one of his frequent voiceovers. His GDR is also one that opens up to the world, but where a wonderful inversion takes place: it is West Germans who riotously embrace the opportunity to flee from the ravages of consumer capitalism for a society built on a sense of collective pride and provision. His mother’s illness gives him a creative opening to explore his own response to the biggest political shift of the late 20th century.
This is gently hinted at when we see Lara – Alex’s Russian girlfriend – spilling the beans to Christiane a few days before her death. Whilst the family are viewing Alex’s artificially constructed TV celebration of the 41st birthday of the GDR, Christiane gazes lovingly at her son, never once allowing him to see that she knows the truth. Alex links the promise of the GDR’s better side with his mother, and she deliberately ensures that this will always be the case: “The country my mother left behind was a country she believed in; a country we kept alive till her last breath; a country that never existed in that form; a country that, in my memory, I will always associate with my mother. “
Becker’s beautifully understated twist was perhaps too subtle, as it appears to have sailed over the heads of most reviewers.
