Synopsis: East Germany, the year 1989: A young man protests against the regime. His mother watches the police arresting him and suffers a heart attack and falls into a coma. Some months later, the GDR does not exist anymore and the mother awakes. Since she has to avoid every excitement, the son tries to set up the GDR again for her in their flat. But the world has changed a lot...

Now for the Zone's Eye View:

By Claire Hoang

Director: Wolfgang Becker

Cast: Daniel Brühl, Kathrin Sass, Maria Simon, Chulpan Khamatova, Florian Lukas, Alexander Beyer, Burghart Klaußner, Michael Gwisdek

It's been about six months since I've seen this movie, but the rare opportunity of it being released in England before America means that I should really get off my bum and make an effort to write a review!

The story is set in East Germany in 1989. The regime is toppling as communism slowly and surely gives way to consumerism. Alexander Kerner is fully supportive of this move, but his mother is not. Seeing him at a demonstration is the final straw and leads her to fall into a coma. In the time she is unconscious the GDR collapses and the world as she knows it changes extremely quickly. Within a few months East and West are connected, McDonalds has set up round the corner and old independent shops have been replaced by giant supermarkets. His mother eventually wakes up but Alex is told that a shock could finish her, therefore he goes to extraordinary lengths to protect his mother from the emerging new world….

Goodbye Lenin is one of those fantastic films that tells a political story but with humor and realism. This isn't a story about a person at the top, or a person suffering at the bottom, this is about how ordinary everyday peoples lives were affected by an amazingly fast political change.

Alex's mother is a metaphor for the old idealist views of communism, but she is also a metaphor for the differences in societal views in different generations. Indeed the younger generation take like a duck to water to the change in culture, embracing the clothes, fast food and capitalistic lifestyle. This is evident by the quick change in Alex's sister, (gets a job in McDonalds, marries a 'western' German and throws out all the old furniture). Meanwhile the older generation crave the former values and lifestyles of eastern German society. The beauty of this films is it shows twenty years of western evaluation in nine months, which would be a shock to anyone's system!

However political the film is, the reason it works so well is because it balances the politics with almost slapstick humor. Keeping the secret from their mother involves faking news broadcasts, dressing up in their old clothes, lying about their partners and even changing labels on food tins! There's so many great things about this film that it has to be seen to be believed. 

The visual style is simple, reflecting the telling of a story documenting normal people. The actors could all be compared to funnier Mike Leigh regulars. Daniel Bruhl who plays Alex really is the heart of the film. His great comic timing is contrasted nicely with his sympathetic performance as an awkward young man who is not just looking after his mother, but looking after what 'old eastern' Germany used to stand for too. Add in some extra plotlines involving his estranged father and a love interest and we are given a wonderfully rounded character. Katrin Sab as his mother also gives a great performance. As a parent who worked extremely well as a citizen in 'East Germany', but is alien to the new one, she doesn't invoke sympathy, but empathy.

I would definitely recommend that you see this film. At the time the Berlin Wall came down I was only nine years old and just didn't appreciate the dramatic change in German society by the time they played England in the World Cup (we lost!).
This film will provoke, entertain and inform. It will provide far more of a window into history than any stuffy documentary ever will as it shows the lives of the people it affected.

I won't give the ending away, but I'll just say that it definitely made me think more about the ever changing world and the perception of who the change is helping.

Review score: 10