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MovieMail's Review
Much like the Berlin Wall upon which much of the film hinges, Wolfgang Becker's delightful Goodbye Lenin pitches itself halfway between the spartan family theatrics of Thomas Vinterberg's Festen and the verdant sentimentality of Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother.
It's Germany, 1989, and Christiane, a staunch supporter of East Germany's socialist regime, collapses in the street as her son, Alexander, is dragged into the back of a Stasi van amidst the violence and mayhem of a peaceful protest gone wrong. A heart attack leaves Christiane in a coma for 8 tumultuous months in which the Berlin Wall falls and East and West Germany tentatively embrace reunification. Upon her waking, the doctors inform son Alexander and daughter Ariana that the slightest shock is likely to kill their mother - so Alexander hatches a plan, a plan that will see East Germany immortalised within the confines of his mother's bedroom.
Alexander, played with suitable intensity by Daniel Bruhl (he looks like Ahston Kuchler, of MTV's Punk'd, but he acts like Spiderman's Tobey Maguire) - is forced to hunt out abandoned jars of Spreewald Pickles, film news stories with his Kubrick-loving buddy explaining the appearance of huge Coca Cola billboards across the street and pay children to pretend to be former pupils of his mother - all to maintain the pretence of the continued existence of East Germany.
Striking precisely the right balance between the sour reality experienced by many East Germans (old man Gdanske prowls around the periphery of the movie howling for the bad old days, Alexander and Ariane find themselves cheated out of thousands of Deutschmarks by the bank), and the lightness required to make what is essentially dark material comic, Becker fashions what many consider to be something of a first: a dazzling German comedy.
Dedicated socialist Christiane wakes from a coma into a GDR no longer bounded by an iron curtain. Doctors warn her son that any large shock could kill her, so he sets about reverting their apartment to the communist era and playing old footage when she wants to watch the news. How long can he keep the outside world at bay? Playful, bittersweet comedy.
