Goodbye Lenin!

It's true: real socialism was a failure. But an economic and thinking system that divided and made the entire planet discuss for two centuries deserves better than a lame burial. "Good bye Lenin" is somehow, to put it simply, a respectful funeral that socialism deserved.

Like every well-made film, "Good Bye Lenin" has many successes. Alex Kerner, the protagonist, tells us the story of East Germany and its decline while he tells us the story of his life and his family.

This is a very political film, told through a subjective bias, a personal one: this turns it primarily into a deeply human and moving document. This clever strategy makes the story successfully navigate around the thorny issue of politics. Being for or against communism is an endless discussion, being for or against triumphant capitalism is another endless discussion too.

"Good Bye Lenin", of course, does not avoid addressing these issues but prefer telling them from a filial love and everyday life point of view. It prefers to ask questions, not answer them, and through its art, it overcomes politics and ideologies.

In the late 70's, East Germany launches its first cosmonaut into space and Alex's parents are splitting up. The socialist ideal of progress and decline of the family coincide at the same time. With this counterpoint begins the narrative of this story. And the dialogue and the obvious paradoxes that result from these two situations are constantly enriching the film. Time goes fast. It actually happens in the memory of Alex, with original images taken from the past and his voice-over.

When one reaches adolescence, rebellion comes with it: Alex is against the regimen even though his mother is closely attached to it, mostly in order to overcome the depression that the abandonment of her husband caused, ending up as an exemplary communist. One day when she sees Alex being arrested at a demonstration, she suffers an attack that will leave her in a coma. And during the few months that her coma lasted, deep changes are happening: the Berlin Wall falls, capitalism wins over socialism.

The world in which his mother believed has collapsed like a house of cards. So when she returns to consciousness, she cannot know about the changes because a shock of this magnitude might jeopardize her life. Alex must hide the truth, he must reconstruct reality as it was before, as if nothing had happened.

He has to fake-rebuild nothing less than socialism, something he did not believe in, and just for the love he has towards her mother. A situation to mourn and laugh. And precisely that is the unmistakable tone that makes the story endearing and believable. With the help of his sister, his girlfriend and, above all, a filmmaker friend, he recreates lovingly the daily life of socialism.

And Alex, above the others, ends up feeling nostalgia for it. Yes, socialism was horrible, outdated, inefficient, but is capitalism better, its consumption and advertising that seize up the sky? What is the truth? Hard to know because everything is a lie.

The socialism of his mother may have only existed in her head and she had lied about their father abandoning them for another woman. The ideas and beliefs upon which we build individual and collective destinies are nothing but illusions. We live between mirages of ideas and, perhaps, the only true and real thing is the love that we have for our close ones.

The affection and faith in others are delivered without reservation thorough all the beautiful characters in this film.

Director: Wolfgang Becker

Writers: Bernd Lichtenberg, Wolfgang Becker (co-author) 

Stars: Daniel Brühl, Katrin Saß and Chulpan Khamatova