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Goodbye Lenin I finally got round to see "Goodbye Lenin":http://www.79qmddr.de/ - a film from the Director Wolfgang Becker. When I saw the trailer to this film earlier, I !(left)http://nontroppo.org/blog/images/lenin.jpg (Goodbye Lenin) 115x115! envisaged a limp German slapstick comedy, and one that was not very well made (no jokes about German humour here...). But, luckily the film itself far excelled the weak and poor trailer. The premise of the film is simple - take a strongly socialist mother of a single parent family in the former East Germany, who has a stroke and enters a coma for the 8 months that encompass the fall of the Berlin wall and the headlong rush that Germany took towards reunification. She awakes to a radically changed situation, and the doctor warns her children that any shock may cause another attack. Her son (Alex) takes it as his crusade to stop the knowledge of the fall of the wall from his mother, and this attempt to 'recreate' the lost East Germany becomes the main structure of the film - actually the story as such is not what makes the film. It is the fascinating portrayal of this huge and rapid seismic shift of cultures from East to West. The film is brilliant because it weaves a convincing and touching personal narrative out of these massive social upheavals. It also manages to be **very** funny while always retaining an intelligent humanity to the story, not sacrificing the deeper meaning with cheap laughs. What I really love about it though, is the way the metaphor of 'weightlessness' and the insignificance of individuals in the universe is maintained through the story. This is based on the obsession of Alex with space travel when he was a child, and the way individuals feel helpless in the face of such monumental changes is well reflected in this theme of man 'in the universe'. Sounds trite, but it is handled really well. An Excellent film, but maybe read up a bit on the subject of the fall of the Berlin wall and subsequent reunification process to understand the context the film is situated in. We went with our friend Liane and her father who are German and we had a wonderful discussion with them both on the process from a (West) German's perspective after the film. Posted by Ian at August 03, 2003 07:50 PM | TrackBack