Hellchick

Len and I really wanted to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind this weekend, since it looks really good, but instead we opted to wait until next weekend on that one and this weekend we took in a foreign film at our local indie artsy theater. That film was Goodbye, Lenin!. It was a German film subtitled in English, and we loved it.

It's the late 80's, and Alex is a young East German man watching his country flounder in the death throes of socialism. He and his sister contend with a mother who, after being left by her husband, throws all her energy into the socialist regime, becoming an ardent Party member and doing her part to further the socialist cause. But one evening during a protest, Alex's mother witnesses him being arrested by the cops; she collapses from a heart attack and goes into an 8-month long coma.

When she wakes up, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik is gone. Germany has been united and socialism and the Berlin Wall have both fallen. The doctors warn Alex and his sister, however, that even the slightest shock could kill their mother. So in order to protect her, Alex decides that she cannot learn what's happened to her beloved East Germany. He takes her home and ensconces her in the bedroom of their flat, and sets about recreating the DDR, complete with neighbors who are in on the act.

There are two wonderful things about the movie. The first is the comedy that comes from Alex's attempts at maintaining the old socialist regime and finding it very difficult to do. There are the constant appearances of things from the West that intrude that he has to explain away. There are the cravings his mother has for old East German "delicacies", like Spreewald pickles, that are unavailable (prompting him to find old jars from the garbage, sterilize them, and repackage the new food in the old jars).

The second wonderful thing about the movie is the satire. Alex isn't just recreating the old DDR. He's inadvertently recreating the DDR that his mother (and he) would have liked to live in. It's a strong DDR that people from the West flock to in refuge from capitalism and greed (at least, that's the explanation he gives when he's pinned by a discovery of his mother's of the outside world), not the weak DDR that buckled under the weight of the encroaching West. It culminates when Alex has to do what we've known through the whole film must come: he has to find a way to break the news to his mother. Rather than tell her the truth, he and his friends and family manufacture a "proper" send-off for the DDR that's infinitely more kind than the one history gave it.

Now, this sounds like the movie is making the political statement that capitalism = good and socialism = bad. It really doesn't. It's very neutral on the subject, showing the bad sides of both, but we sort of come to identify with Alex when he longs for a time where his mother was first and foremast happy and healthy, and things elsewhere in life were at least stable.

The only negative to the movie in my opinion was that it tried to be all things in one movie. It was comedy, satire, love story, and family story. There are two subplots that felt unnecessary: the love story between Lara and Alex (although it certainly added some dimension to the film, she didn't appear to be as integral to the story as I'd thought she'd become), and the subplot involving Alex's father (which I won't spoil; suffice it to say that the revelation about Alex's father is critical to the movie, but the later actual involvement of his father really wasn't). These parts didn't detract from the movie for me, they just didn't add anything to it and made it a tad longer than it needed to be, I felt.

I really recommend you catch it if you can. There's another movie playing at the same theater called Kitchen Stories, and it's a Norwegian comedy. I told Len I wanted to see it before it left the theater this Thursday, and he insisted that Norwegians are not funny, which prompted me to defend my genealogical honor. Now we've agreed to see it, and let me tell you...my people better be representin'.