Good Bye Lenin!

These are the film notes for this Sunday's screening:

Germany 2003
Duration 121 minutes
Director: Wolfgang Becker
Starring: Daniel Bruehl, Kathrin Sass and Chulpan Khamatova

Awards and Nominations:
Nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Foreign Language Film
A further 31 wins and 14 nominations

Just prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall Christiane Kerner (Kathrin Sass), an ardent supporter of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany, falls into a coma. After eight months she regains consciousness but her doctors warn her son Alex (Daniel Bruehl) that any further shock could be fatal, and so Alex and his sister make increasingly desperate attempts to hide the evidence of the sudden arrival of capitalism in East Berlin, pretending instead the East German regime remains in power.

As Alex desperately attempts to deceive his mother he resorts to media distortion and emotional blackmail to co-opt people into his schemes and to compel them to act against their principles. These are the tools that the East German regime used to control the general population - as shown so brilliantly in The Lives of Others (2006) – but here Alex’s sole motive is his love for his mother. Alex even manages to create an alternative history of Germany in which the West is cracking up and the generous East opens its borders to accommodate refugees from capitalism, but eventually his deception unravels and Christiane learns the truth about what has really happened.

The film shows that for some Germans the reunification of their country happened too quickly, with the loss of some of the good elements of East Germany as well as the bad. As Alex points out, in the false TV shows he creates East Germany is having the end it deserved rather than the end it got.

The film includes an apparent anachronism in that a t-shirt worn by one of the characters appears to picture the green glyph pattern from The Matrix – a film which did not appear until 1999. However in a deleted scene on the DVD the character, an amateur film maker, tells Alex about an idea for a film where people were enslaved by machines to produce energy while trapped in a computer dream world – a film in which characters live in a simulated reality. The film also contains references to 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange and the flying statue of Lenin echoes a scene with the flying statue of Jesus in La Dolce Vita.