Goodbye Lenin

I saw this on Sunday at the Penthouse Theatre up in Brooklyn. It's one of my favourite Wellington theatres, because of the atmosphere and the vibe. The irony is that in the year I lived up there, I only visited it half a dozen times. Seems silly in retrospect.

Anyway, "Goodbye Lenin" is a German film with subtitles, and is really rather good. The reviewer who said it was a comedy should be shot though. It's a film which centres on the story of a woman who goes into a coma around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and wakes up eight months later with a heart condition, unable to deal with shocks of any sort.

Obviously being a socialist activist and then missing the destruction of your society would be a pretty big shock. Finding out capitalism had won after all would conceivably have finished her off. Her son then, played by someone who reminded me of an Italian guy I know, decides to construct a world unchanged for his mother. The film is about the unravelling of this, and how he infuses his fake socialist world with his own dreams of how it could have been.

It's a touching look at family, and a reminder of how corrupt and brutal the East German regime was, even towards the very end. It's also a nice explore through what an alternative humanist socialism might have looked like, from the writer's perspective. There are elements of comedy but it's not a comedy. It's too, well, German for that.

All in all I'd give it an eight out of ten, and recommend it as a film worth seeing.

Comments

[stef]

sounds very interesting. I saw JSA (Gongdong gyeongbi guyeok) a few weeks ago which tells the story of a friendship struck up by two soliders from north and south korea. Well worth a look in you can get your hands on it.