Good bye Lenin! Rewarded as the Best European Film at the 2003 Berlin Film Festival is the most commercially successful German movie in history. The film provides the glimpse of one of the major European historical event and revolves around during the collapse of Berlin wall .The movie depicts the effect of German reunification on the people and highlights many social and political issues. The Film is based on the story of a young boy named Alex and his fragile mother and his struggle to keep his avid communist mother alive and explores the reunification of East and West Germany through his life.
Alex’s mother, Christiane Kerner, is an avid follower of the Socialist party and a strong political activist, when she sees her son Alex being arrested in an anti-government protest, suffers a heart attack and falls into a coma shortly before the fall of the Berlin’s Wall. During her unconscious stage Germany faces many changes from the fall of Berlin wall to German reunification. But for Christiane, this news might turn to a shock and a relapse. Alex being aware of the fact that even slightest shock could become threat to his mother’s life, Alex hides the fall of the GDR from his mother and maintains the delusion that things are pretty normal in the German democratic republic. He tries to create the GDR again for her in their apartment by decorating the flat in its previous decor, replacing old clothes, and feeding his mother in old labeled jars as earlier. But like all deception, gradually it becomes complicated and even more difficult to maintain.
Despite everything, Christiane seldom witnesses strange incidences, such as a huge Coca-Cola ad banner spreading out on a building outside the flat on which Alex portrays his own story regarding the claim of patent dispute of Coca Cola’s invention to GDR from West. Even Alex and his buddy creates their own fake special reports by editing old tapes of news broadcasts, pretending to his mother to be a live broadcast. Thus Becker enfolds the Alex’s heart touching attempts to save his mother in every possible way and its is more of coming of age with sub-plots including the development of Alex’s relationship with Nurse Lara and Ariane’s job at Burger king after she quits her university study.
But one day Christiane ventures out from that tiny fictional world, sees a changed world herself. She learns that the streets are flooded with Westerners and is perplexed by all the ads for Coke. Alex and Denis again construct a fictional story to her that Westerners are fleeing to the East and produce fake newscasts reporting that the West is facing collapse and the Coke’s right has reverted to the communist nation.
Good bye Lenin is an idiosyncratic comedy, because it never utterly says the self deception which leads Christiane to support the Communist Party. In the end of the movie it is surprisingly suggested that she may have replaced her spouse with that of communist party as an act of compensation to her emotional trauma as in the earlier part of the movie it is learnt that his father abandoning his family behind flee over the Berlin wall to the west.
The film has many ups and downs and is a nostalgic as it is reflects and represents how the societies’ significant changes can adamantly affect people. The movie is marvelously entertaining, witty and occasionally poignant, tragic-comedy dealing with issues related with relationships, bonds to those of political, social and cultural. It gives a great insight of how the whole transition of communist to western world democracy influenced people.
The Thin Line between Truth and Lies: The Power of the Kerner Family Relationships
Has Alex continues to live the life he produces become increasingly outrageous. The length which she goes to 2 create these lies for his mother are likewise outrageous. When her favorite pickles could not be found he dives into the dumpsters in their neighbourhood in search of an empty glass jar from her favorite pickle brand and filled it with the new pickles from Holland. But perhaps most interesting is that he uses legitimate footage of the Berlin Wall falling and the people rushing into the west but he uses this image to twist the truth with a new commentary. The commentary states that this footage is actually depicting people rushing away from the list in order to get rid of their materialistic lives and embraced the ideals of the East. While this is entertaining in the film itself, it is easy to see how even in modern times, today, we are told or shown what things to believe in the media and they are not necessarily the whole truth.
Most interesting leave though is that the deeper Alex in bed himself in this fictional world the more convinced his girlfriend and his sister become that he is doing the wrong thing. Alex of course is not the only member of his family who has started to blend the truth. In fact the mother revealed at the end of the film that for many years she was the one who abandoned the children’s father by refusing to go with him in the West. The children had been told that their father left either in search of another woman or simply turning his back on his children but in truth the mother refused to go with him and made her children stay in the East.
Family relationships are a key element in this particular where the family is made up of vastly different characters. And as the narrative move forward the relationships between all of these characters become increasingly strained the results of Alex attempting to protect his mother with his charade. He becomes increasingly controlling and the deception he started in order to protect his mother is taken to extremes which has an impact on what his sister does for a living, which diapers her baby can wear, and who was responsible for the invention of Coca Cola. Of course in spite of all these lies there exists a strong bond between the mother and her two children. Love is what allows them to forgive one another and it allows them to start a new beginning. Both Alex and his sister forgive their mother for her deception, naturally because of their own.
It becomes increasingly clear as the film continues that the mother initially suspect her children are lying and you’re the end of the film she figures it out. As he walks into her hospital room following her second stroke it becomes clear that Alex’s girlfriend has told her what was going on and in her final moments with her son she pretends to continue believing in his lies, and act which underlies the true strength of their family love.
In reality this font is one deeply seated in Alex’s childhood. The flashbacks to his youth show him desperate to make the world right for his mother and desperate to make his mother proud of him. He often dreamed of being the second man in space from East Germany and took part in the young rocket Builders Association. His childhood anxieties about pleasing his mother and making her proud continued well into adulthood as he continued to seek out his mother’s approval by creating the perfect world for her.