Good Bye, Lenin!

In Wolfgang Becker’s film the lie starts from guilt, not whimsy. Christiane collapses with a heart attack after seeing her son beaten and arrested at a protest, and spends 8 months in a coma. When she wakes, Alex rebuilds East Germany inside the flat, covering up his own part in her collapse. The long middle is not a politics lesson but a production workshop in a living room: old furniture hauled back, Western groceries decanted into old jars, fake news bulletins shot with his colleague Denis. The sharpest loss is bureaucratic: his mother’s hidden East German savings die when the currency exchange deadline passes. Bernd Lichtenberg’s script sat in a drawer for years, through 6 drafts. Yann Tiersen wrote the score, and one piano piece also appears in Amélie, which is why it sounds familiar. At the European Film Awards it took 6 prizes: film, screenplay and actor from the academy, director, actor and actress from the audience vote. It won the Blue Angel Award in Berlin and was Germany’s Oscar submission, but was never nominated. A good fit if you want reunification handled as a set dressing problem, with the camera kept inside one flat. Not for anyone waiting for the opening police violence to be pursued; the film shuts that thread and returns to the kitchen.