March 5, 2004
There is an enormous gap between what the German film Good Bye, Lenin! seems it will be and what it actually is. That gap is filled with a poignant and often comic insight into what happens to a society in flux.

Frankly, at first glance, the plot sounds a bit tricked out, not even plausible (and how wrong that notion turns out to be). With director Wolfgang Becker working from a script by Bernd Lichtenberg, Good Bye, Lenin! is the saga of an eccentric family living in East Germany in the 1980s.

The Wall is still up, symbolically as well as in reality. The family is dominated by the rigid, gung-ho, pro-Communist views of Comrade Mom (Katrin Sass). Selfless to an exhausting fault, she devotes herself to the class struggle, but leaves her two children (Daniel Bruhl and Maria Simon) adrift and fatherless. Dad fled to the West years earlier. Mom's socialism, incidentally, seems more emotional than ideological.

So emotional, in fact, that she suffers a massive heart attack when she discovers her son beaten in a pro-freedom rally. When she wakes up months later, the Wall has fallen and Germany is about to be reunified. Frightened by the prospect that the shock of this monumental change could trigger another heart attack, the loving son decides to shield Mom from the truth.

So an elaborate ruse is put in motion: With Mom confined to her bed at home, family and friends pretend nothing has changed. People go to extremes. Yet the smallest details -- getting their hands on a jar of East German pickles now that western goods have flooded into the former East Bloc country -- require a dedication beyond all reason. Hilariously, a filmmaker friend fakes pro-East German news broadcasts that are fed into Mom's television. Live TV would give it all away.

The gap between how absurd this sounds and how it really plays is filled with an uncanny parade of details about how lives are led during political upheavals. The Becker-Lichtenberg team cleverly elevates this small, quirky story into a passionate embrace of the entire German society.

So Good Bye, Lenin! turns out to be a precise, and utterly captivating, socio-political document that simultaneously plays small and big, personal and universal. That it does so with a slightly wicked sense of humour is a huge bonus. That it does so with such keen intelligence is gratifying.

The splendid acting ensemble is first-rate in getting the duality of the story across. Each key actor -- Bruhl, Sass, Simon, Chulpan Khamatova, Alexander Beyer, Florian Lukas and Michael Gwisdek as the drunken school principal -- plays it straight, absolutely real, while leaving it to the filmmakers to set things askew and heighten the experience.

Critically, this is not a farce, nor was it ever intended to be, according to Becker. The film loves these characters and their complex personal dilemmas. They are not made out to be fools, so, when the tragic elements are thrust into the mix, you feel it, as they do. That is what the cinema should be able to do.

Good Bye, Lenin! (which plays in German with English subtitles) has enchanted audiences at the Toronto filmfest and Floating Film Festival. Now it deserves attention in its theatrical run.

(This film is rated PG)