Goodbye Lenin

Goodbye Lenin. I'm finding this film very tough to watch. I find myself pausing frequently. It punches me in all the sensitive spots, especially in the heart. Anyone else had a similar experience?

For those who haven't seen it, the film is about a young man in the GDR whose mother, who had become a massive Party follower (idealisitc/fanatic to the point of being sidelined by other members), had a heart stroke while seeing him getting brutally arrested during pro-democratic protests in 1989.

She stays in coma eight months, enough for the wall to fall. She eventually awakens, and her health is extremely precarious; any emotional shock could kill her. Cue her son (feeling responsible for her state) enforcing a Massive Multiplayer Scam on her bed-ridden self to make her oblivious to the fact that the wall fell. This gets increasingly difficult as the ex-GDR suffers dramatic changes.

As I said, it's emotionally very poignant, despite the Zany Scheme-sounding premise.

edited 6th Oct '12 1:03:57 PM by TheHandle

It's a movie all about moving on, which are often the ones that punch the watchers the hardest - they're always about either accepting loss or losing even more, or about finding yourself when you realize that you've lost something. It's quite poignant, and mixes comedy and drama well.

The scene with the non-exchangeable marks struck me the hardest. Money has the value you put into obtaining it, and those were life-savings. Gone to smoke. The unsympathetic attitude of the bank clerk, while understandable, really didn't help. "Hands away, you asslickers!" (Do we have a trope for asking security personnel not to unnecessarily manhandle you? Also, do we have a trope for extremely bureaucratic deadlines being missed and destroying you?).

edited 6th Oct '12 1:21:40 PM by TheHandle

My German class is studying it at the moment as part of our A-level course. I really like it, although I have to say that after having watched it six or seven times it gets a bit tiresome. I really love that nostalgic atmosphere.

The actual "goodbye Lenin" scene is probably one of my favorite scenes in cinema.

You mean where the statue is flying with its hand outstretched, like it was begging, or longing, or missing something?

You know, I'm not a fan of how de-communism-ification happened. It's like everyone got seriously shafted and shoved away. Even nowadays, the ex-GDR relies heavily on a constant flux of money from the DDR, they've got soaring unemployment, and...

I mean, you just can't have a cosmonaut be a freaking Taxi driver! He's obviously and horrendously overqualified! It's like when you meet a janitor who used to be a Physics professor. How come he's not getting hired by a university?

The taxi driver wasn't Sigmund Jähn. He just looked a lot like him. There's a line in the scene where Alex 'recognises' him and the driver says something like 'haha, yeah, I get mistaken for him a lot'.

But to your main point, I remember reading that a large majority of East Germans surveyed thought life was better under the GDR.

edited 7th Oct '12 12:11:25 PM by cityofmist

The implication was that it quite possibly was Jähn, pretending he wasn't because he was ashamed of his decline (or just sick and tired of people reminding him of his glory days).

That was the scene I was referring to, but I didn't really read these sorts of emotions from it. I saw it as a very personal symbolic gesture of parting between Christine and the GDR. But anyway, the direction and score were incredible.

edited 7th Oct '12 12:15:09 PM by BornIn1142

Hmm. Well, to me personally it felt like Alex mistaking an ordinary guy for his childhood hero out of wishful thinking fit better into the film, but I can see how your interpretation works too. I guess it's just ambiguous.

See, I think seeing a childhood hero degraded like that would be something Alex concretely wouldn't have wanted, so the wishful thinking idea seems a bit odd.

Well, it's not degraded, per se, taxi drivers aren't some sort of lowlifes or anything, but it's such a waste.

The scene at the library when they started shooting and everyone went staring was very amusing. I wonder what went through their heads.

Be Careful What You Wish For and all that jazz. Though I suppose what they wished for was a democratic state with freedom of speech and freedom from police, not getting co-opted and assimilated like that. I mean, you'd have expected, for example, that the GDR brands of food products would disappear because, after a fair fight, the new Western products proved to be more competitive (or at least more shiny), but it seemed like they just got... replaced, overnight. Like No Export for You, except in your own country. "I want to buy Bland-Name Product, why can't I have Bland-Name Product? I've been eating Bland-Name Product all my life, I don't want to change now."

"Coca-Cola was a socialist drink all along?" really got me cracking. As if commercial products had ideologies or confessions. I remember reading that, back when the Cuban revolution took place, and Coca Cola closed their factories there, everyone, including The Che, was anxious for a replacement. It took them some time and some trial and error to get a passable imitation, and the interval was painful for everyone involved.

edited 7th Oct '12 1:48:15 PM by TheHandle