Finally, the coup-de-gras of Berlin 2003 – another German film, no less, a film about Berlin, at that. And a comedy to boot. The film is Good Bye, Lenin! and did, as comedies rarely do in competitions, not win any top bears, but it did get a well-deserved Blue Angel award for best European film.
Recalling that great Böll novella, Nicht nur zur Weihnachtszeit, Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin! starts out in East Berlin in the late 1970’s and ends up in the early 1990’s, when there’s no more wall and just one Berlin with very little of the eastern days left (they only kept the traffic lights with arrows, which was found more useful than the western ones without). It’s a time of great change for everyone, not least the Kerner family, and especially Mutter Kerner. She has, since her husband defected, put great effort into raising her two children and devoting even more energy into the Party. Come autumn 1989, she is a well-respected GDR citizen, just on her way to a festive party function, when she suddenly falls down from a heart attack. She survives, but spends eight months in a coma, during which there are severe changes in the city, the country and the Party.
Once revitalised, she is warned not to submit herself to any shock what so ever, and so her devoted son Alex decides that she’d better not know anything about those external affairs. Now bedridden, she is taken home and placed in her room, where everything is like it always was, down to the right brands of eastern pickles and (through the ingeniousness of some tampering with video technology) the television news shows ("GDR, the home of the micro chip!").
But what to do when a great Coca-Cola sign is placed right outside of her window? Alex has to be more and more enterprising, as the world around him gradually changes. A script like that has to be a dream for many a director, but also easily screwed up – Becker certainly proves himself astonishingly capable of mixing the fun with the serious, and comes up with one of this years most amicable pieces of cinema.
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