Film: "Goodbye, Lenin!"

Rip van Winkle and the Wall
<http://worldfilm.about.com/cs/germa...>

With "Goodbye Lenin," director Wolfgang Becker tells the
story of German reunification and the liberation of the
penned-in citizens of the East as tragic-comedy
patterned after Washington Irving’s Rip van Winkle, the
man who falls asleep in an English colony and wakes up
in a whole new country. By turns funny, instructive, and
sad, "Goodbye Lenin!" does an admirable job at breathing
life into a tumultuous time in the country’s history.
The German Rip van Winkle is Christiane Kerne (Katrin
Sass), an East Berlin single mother and commited
socialist who falls into a coma on the eve of the
demonstration that, causes the corrupt regime to change
without a shot being fired. Unconscious, Christiane
misses the fall of the Wall, the celebrations of her
liberated comrades, and the arrival of capitalism in the
form of new money and (in a nod to Billy Wilder’s "One,
Two, Three,") Coca-Cola trucks. Her daughter Ariane
(Maria Simon) takes a job at Burger King and son Alex
(Daniel Bruhl) falls in love with mother’s beautiful
Russian nurse, Lara (Chulpan Khamatova.)

When Chirstiane wakes from her coma and doctors warn
that the shock of the GDR’s demise might kill her, Alex
and Ariane decide to keep the reunification from her:
old clothes and furniture are procured, Ariane puts her
baby daughter into the plastic diapers common under the
old system, and Alex races to procure newly hard-to find
brands of pickles and coffee. As they try to shield
Christiane from cigarette commercials and the sound of
the neighbor’s brand new satellite TV, they become the
producers of an increasingly complex fake world
surrounding their sick mother’s bed.

Much of the humor in "Goodbye, Lenin!" relies on
"Ostalgie," the paradoxical nostalgia for life under the
socialist system, and requires some memory of the events
or detail involved. Alex’s frantic search for
Spreewaldgurken will be funnier to anyone who’s ever
eaten one. Part of this particularity made "Goodbye,
Lenin!" a big financial success in Europe, where it won
the Berlin Film Festival and the German Film Awards. If
you remember cheering at Rudi Völler during the 1990
soccer World Cup, you are a shoo-in for this film, but
if you remember the Trabant only as the weird car U2
hung from the stage during their "Achtung, Baby!" tour,
you’re bound to miss some of the jokes.

The good news is that this might not matter: only about
a third of "Goodbye, Lenin!" is a comedy. As funny as
some of the set pieces are, the film also attempts to
work out what the German Democratic Republic meant to
its citizens, a question that was all but ignored in the
rush to reunification. "Ossis," as the former citizens
of the GDR are called, were simply supposed to be happy
about their annexation, their freedoms, their Westmark.
"Ostalgie" is the voice that says, wait a minute. Yes,
we lived under an opressive system—but that life was
the only kind we’ve ever known. It was ours, and now
it’s gone.

The fake socialist republic Alex builds to protect his
mother is, in many ways, the ideal Germany many Ossies
might have dreamed of. Letting go of it to join the
rigors of the free marketplace amounts to losing the
heroes of childhood. To Alex, this does not mean Lenin,
but Sigmund Jähn, the first East German in space whom
the reunification reduced to the obscurity of a taxi
cab. "Goodbye, Lenin!" explores these issues while
telling a story that’s both funny and emotionally
involving.