Published Apr 19, 2004
Good Bye, Lenin goes far with a simple, but absurd, plot. Alex Kerner, his sister and mother live an idyllic existence in East Germany, until his father defects to the West. Then, hoping to keep her world together, his mother, Christiane, loses herself in ideology and becomes a big Communist Party booster. Leading the Young Pioneers and sending missives to the Party about the unsuitability of sexy underwear to the vast proletarian masses. Christiane continues in this direction with some success until, one day, she suffers a heart attack. She is in a coma for eight months. And this is the problem, for, during those eight months, Communism falls.
When Christiane wakes up, her doctor tells Alex that she is fragile and may suffer another heart attack and die if exposed to any stressors. Alex looks at the newspaper and asks the doctor, is the opening of the border with the West not a stressor? Will his mother die if she learns of the fall of Communism?
So Alex and his sister take his mother home. They make sure that her room is filled with the relics of East Bloc living and that nothing’s changed, even concealing from her his sister’s new job at Burger King. But life is filled with a million little challenges. Old, reliable products disappear from supermarket shelves and are replaced by imports from Holland. Coca-cola is everywhere. The news is filled with reports of pending reunification. Alex’s efforts to conceal the truth from his mother go from the earnest to the absurd as he tries to create a complete alternative reality. In the process, the filmmaker attempts — and even, occasionally, succeeds — in telling us that our realities are essentially what we construct.
The film itself reminded me very much of Wes Anderson’s work, not fearing the bittersweet and finding humor in absurdity in itself rather than chasing the punch lines and slapstick that is visible in so much comedy today. There are a few laugh-out-loud moments, and more moments in which you hide your eyes in fear of darkly comic disaster — a very German take on the genre.
Good Bye, Lenin is a fun film to see, but probably best rented rather than seen in the theater; there are no shots that need to be seen on the large screen so you might as well save a few bucks. Put it on your Netflix list, though, and don’t miss it.