Posted: 08/16/2003

Goodbye Lenin!

(2002)

by Jerome de Groot

Requiem for a dream…

Writer/director Wolfgang Becker presents us with a work which moves into more contemplative and thoughtful areas than many recent indies. He manages to present us with some of the hectic energy of recent breakthrough films such as Run Lola Run while dispensing, for the main part, with the stylistic tics and postmodern fragmentation which attended Lola’s desperate chase. Good Bye Lenin! instead incorporates the fantastical into the narrative itself, and the conceptual leaps are mainly in the mind of the audience and protagonist.

In East Berlin in late 1989 Alex’s mother suffers a heart attack when she sees him arrested at a peace march. Wed to the state since her husband defected, it is implied that she cannot bear the traumatic death throes of East Germany figured in the infighting and rioting of those final months. She enters a coma, and when she emerges 8 months later it is 1990, the Wall has fallen, and the society that once supported and sheltered her has eaten itself entirely. Some old hands bemoan the passing of the state, but her family are unrecognisable. Her daughter has literally embraced westernisation—working for Burger King and sleeping with a Wessie—and her son has traded in television repair for satellite dish installation. Informed that any major shock could complicate her recovery and maybe even kill her, the siblings decide to recreate the old East in her bedroom, complete with rationed food, singing Pioneer scouts and mocked-up newscasts. Alex spends his time trawling through the detritus of the old state, now on sale, and becomes obsessed with reclaiming a misremembered prelapsarian past. Becker and his team have a lot of fun recreating the dour communist look, although goodness knows where they got a working Trabant from. There is almost a fond nostalgia for the pre-1989 world, although it is also substantially mocked. In the end the film celebrates a unified Germany represented by the newly configured family crossing the divide, and the national football team beating England in the World Cup semi-finals (obviously the final itself, which figures as a footnote, wasn’t as visceral; sadly the unifying effect of showing Chris Waddle missing his penalty was somewhat missing to the English audience I saw it with, all of whom audibly gasped. Again).

Comas are often used as narrative tropes to interrogate the world of the awake. Douglas Coupland’s novel Girlfriend in a Coma refigured the capitalist world after a coma-induced fantastical Armageddon, deploying the sleeper as an angel of purification on a group of school friends and their community. In Good Bye Lenin! Alex gives the old GDR the send off he thinks it deserved, and through his mother’s unknown need for continuity realises his own celebration of pre-unified Germany. He rewrites the end of communism, casting it as the winner rather than the loser of the cold war. The film doesn’t really know what it thinks about his nostalgia for the old state. Some of the most bitter-sweet jokes attend his fantasising and desire for things to be as they were, or how he feels they should have been. A falsified newscast explains how Western refugees are flooding East Berlin, desperate to escape capitalist society. Coca-Cola, it emerges, was actually invented by Russian scientists in the 1950s—the corrupt Americans are forced to give the patent back. The West is faintly satirised—communism may have become a repressive, evil force, but the embracing of the new commodity culture has led to an inevitable alienation and unhappiness. Alex’s sister encounters their father at work, seeing him for the first time in 11 years. ‘What did you say to him?’ he asks in awe. ‘Enjoy your meal and thank you for choosing Burger King’ comes the sobbing, inevitable reply. This film is kind of Rip Van Winkle meets Misery, a comedy of being out of step and out of time. Yet in the final moments, when in another faked news broadcast the opening of Germany’s borders to the West is announced, it is clear that the fantasy is more important to Alex than his mother.

The film is interested in the dynamic of old and new, the tension between the state careering toward capitalism and interesting creation, and the memory of stability and childhood. There is a good metaphor in Alex’s search for a particular brand of collectivist gherkin—the packaging may be different, but everyone still eats them and they are pretty much the same things (although the new ones are now from Holland, a subtle piece of national fragmentation that the film explores delicately). Good Bye Lenin! is interested in how memory and fantasy can sustain through a period of trauma, be it the ideological end of the state or the death of a mother. The film gently explores nostalgia, sentiment and family. It is a nuanced piece that doesn’t really push its ideas to the limit but enables some good, free work from the actors and expects something from the audience. The jokes are good, the script tight and the direction unfussy—all in all, a solid piece that shows some development but is not really so much a leap forward for Becker than a widening of perspective.

Jerome de Groot is old enough to remember the wall coming down. Just.

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