After reading my blog on the movies I have covered in it, my fellow INFITT member Mr Jean-Luc Chevillard from Paris recommended that I see this German Movie “Good Bye Lenin”. The title alone was enough to make me interested. Today I got a chance to see this movie.
The movie’s story happens in East Berlin from October 1989 to just after German unification a year later. Alex lives with his sister and his mother. His father fled to the West abandoning the family. Alex’s mother single headedly raises the kids and becomes an idealist and supporter of the ruling Socialist Party. Later, she suffers a near-fatal heart attack and falls into a coma. When she comes out of Coma, Doctors advise Alex not to give any exciting news to her mother. So he recreates a make-believe communist-era inside their house to make his mother think that all is well in Berlin outside. This happens till his mother dies peacefully having lived in a Communist Berlin which didn’t exist.
The director does a fine job of bringing out the difference in life in East Berlin before the fall of the Berlin Wall and just months after it, by showing simple things like a selection of Pickles in a Super Market to the hoardings and fashion.
Goodbye Lenin (2003) by Wolfgang Becker