Film Review: Goodbye, Lenin!

As one of my film teachers says about work without pretensions to deepness, "It is what it is." And Goodbye, Lenin! seems, to its merit, to be without pretensions. "There are comic moments but we always tried to entertain without ever making the characters ridiculous," says director Wolfgang Becker. I think he succeeded there.

An entire genre has been created by directors who grew up under communist rule. Wolfgang Becker did not grow up under communist rule, but on the western edge of West Germany. Nevertheless, his film Goodbye, Lenin! taps into a favorite censored filmmaker theme, the mother and son film, where the father has flown the coop. The comparison is perhaps unfair, but I am thinking particularly of the Aleksandr Sokurov (director of The Russian Ark) film, Mother and Son (1997), and Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror (1974), among others. Wolfgang Becker's is certainly not as weighty, nor is it a masterpiece in filming and storytelling, but the number of awards it's won indicates that it has filled some needs.

Its sitcom style not withstanding, it does stir up many questions for me about the fall of the Berlin wall, and life before and after. The story, if you don't know it, runs like this: The father disappears from the family circle for reasons unknown, and the mother is traumatized. When she comes back to life, she devotes herself totally to The Party. Her children adore her, but are not all agog with current politics. When mother sees son protesting and being mishandled she suffers from a heart attack. The son is unable to save her, and she goes into a coma. While she is out the wall falls, and when she comes to, still weak and in danger of dying, the son decides to create an insulated communist world in her bedroom, so that she, bedridden, will experience no deadly shock. The fight to avoid new products and media and recreate the old dominates most of the coming months. He ends up creating an ideal but dead world that stirs longing in the hearts of many, and is distasteful to others.

As with the other films I've mentioned, the relation of ailing mother and distressed son parallels the relation of a country cut off from the world and its past and its lost citizens. The twist is that the mother is not an icon of romantic, nationalist Germany, but an emblem of a long-lived impossibility. Her life of separation from "The Fatherland" (divorce from her husband) was preserved, before the wall fell, through state artifice. However, her abandonment and my sympathies came into question toward the end of the movie, when it became clear what role choice had played in her situation. Again, the analogy to the East German state-- although it was not their choice to separate from the Fatherland, it was the result of some pretty grievous sins.

In my eyes, one of the greatest strengths of the film is its absolutely consistent look. The film isn't visually flashy, aside from the saturation of the worn out yellows, greens, browns and carrots of the East German soup. When commercialism finally comes, the red and white Coca-Cola banners are a startling and clean contrast. The new products are less drab, have less homey comfortability (although the food is, after all, still mostly German). We see nostalgia mixed with rightful disdain in the eyes of one character when she is reunited with a shirt she wore before reunification. "What terrible things we wore," she says almost tenderly. In eight months, all the young people have changed their wardrobes entirely.

The camera work is steady and unsurprising. Midrange shows the action, close-ups (but not too close, just enough to isolate the figure from others) for the reaction. There was no clever framing, no fast editing. It isn't the self-aware, flashy, dizzying camera work and editing I have come to expect from a contemporary film. It's totally straight. In fact, it's sitcom style, with a live audience to provide the laugh track. Some of the jokes are good, but they are all situational, and require a somewhat labored setup, previewing the punchline perfectly-- so I found myself laughing before the punchline, and frowning when it finally came. There were a couple of slapstick moments that worked without set-up, such as when a catheter got in the way of the son's interest in watching nurses' legs. Incidentally, this is one of the handful of times that the camera is used as the vision of the character, and not just to record the situation. It was also very TV, something one might see on "Scrubs."

This film has won about 15 major awards in Europe, many of them at the Berlin film festival. It has become an anthem for those who want to ride on a sentimental journey back to the days when the US wasn't the only superpower. The world in hindsight is a lot less scary than the alternative.

As an outsider, I am left with many questions, none of which the film has any obligation to answer. Although the appearance of Berlin, at least, may be vastly changed, I'm told it's not so changed in other parts of East Germany. So is the nostalgia significantly different in Berlin? Those products that have disappeared have begun coming back on the market (and not for the taste, they say!) Is this nostalgia for products just a search for the familiar, and for souvenirs of the past? Because East Germany was in many ways an island, most of their products were produced locally, which is a kind of power and stability. Now they are afloat in a sea of commerce, and, by all appearances, deeply materialistic. With the fall of the wall, the foreign imposition (it is significant that it did not arise organically through a bloody and popular revolution--it was not their revolution) of communism, of Lenin, is removed, and with it some of the power of the East German people. Lost jobs, lost connection to land, lost products.

Again, I can't help wondering about this emphasis on products throughout the movie, new and old. The change in stuff is much more emphasized than the change in more subtle aspects of culture, of thought, of art, of interpersonal relationships. The disappearance of the omnipresent, paranoiac Stasi plays no part in this film. It's about STUFF, with a bit part, a hushed side note, about a loss of security. Loss of the known, but perhaps with a selective memory. Mocha Mix and little boys singing, clever petitions and humorous newscasts. What about there being more secret police and informants than in communist Russia? Neighbors, children and spouses all became spies for the state. Many people have not yet recovered from the trauma of it. The fact that Becker hired many consultants does not prevent me from wondering what the film would have been had it been directed by someone born and raised in the old East Germany. And if it would have been the same film, what a comparison it would have been to filmmakers, writers and artists from other communist backgrounds. I know I'm being unfair, it is what it is, but this film is, comparatively, an ode to a pickle. Is this what happens when an ideology penned by a German takes root in another culture, and then is reintroduced to it's native land? Marxist theory has been criticized for its materialist limitations; perhaps it reflects the country from whence it came. Is it a commentary on a self-indulgent nostalgia that makes the one character least willing to play charades a Russian?

The film is about an attachment to the past, but it never questions the nature of the past, and only scratches the surface on the nature of the attachment. Back to the mother and son metaphor, it is seen but not experienced (at least by this viewer.) The great films on this subject make you understand on a gut level what that attachment is all about. It is not because it is comedy that it is inhibited from reaching deeper.