After the Fall
Where were you when the Berlin Wall came down? Most of us watched in amazement as the fearless revolutionaries tore down the barrier that had enclosed East Germany in its socialist seclusion for 40 years.
In a hospital in East Berlin, Alex Kerner’s mother, Christiane, slept through the excitement. Having lapsed into a coma just before the wall’s demise, she continued to sleep for the eight months of fast-paced modernization and the shift to capitalism that followed.
Good-bye Lenin, co-written and directed by Wolfgang Becker, tells the story of a family torn between the comfortable past and an exciting, yet daunting future. Alex’s father left when he was still young, prompting Christiane (Katrin Sass) to embrace socialism whole-heartedly, thrusting her every effort into the party’s various causes.
After Christiane’s miraculous emergence from the coma, doctors warn Alex (Daniel Bruhl) that his mother’s condition is too fragile to survive shock of any sort. So he and his sister, Ariane (Maria Simon), are forced to go to great lengths to shield their mother from witnessing the complete makeover of her beloved socialist homeland.
In order to keep the illusion going, Alex must rebuild his mother’s old life, from wearing old-style clothes to salvaging old food jars and refilling them with Western items (as stores no longer carried the East-German products his mother is accustomed to). At one point, a Coca-Cola banner, the tell-tale sign of capitalism, is hung on a building adjacent to her bedroom window. Alex manages to quell his mother’s horror by producing a fake news broadcast crediting East Germans with the invention of Coke.
Though the premise of the story is tragic, the daily trials and tribulations Alex faces are hilarious. The element of romance also keeps things upbeat when Alex falls for the enchanting Russian nurse, Lara.
The duality of Alex’s life is what’s striking about the film; inside his mother’s room, he’s recreating the East Germany he knew growing up, while outside, he’s racing through an exhilarating world of Westernization, freedom and young love.
A major plot twist at the end of the film encapsulates the overall bittersweet feeling that pervades it throughout. —Molly Kincaid
October 7, 2004 * Vol. 14, No. 41
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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