Good Bye Lenin!
Good Bye, Lenin is a good movie. After a few decades of revolting movies, the Germans have started to undermine that tradition with some good ones. Up until recently, the only good German movie I’d ever seen was an existential classic where the title was the best part: The Goal Keeper’s Fear of the Penalty Kick. But recently, I really liked Run, Lola, Run, and I found Mostly Martha an engaging film of cooking, love, and the liberation of Germans by Italians. And now comes Good Bye, Lenin. The film is ostensibly and obviously about the unificaton of East and West Germany around 1990. But the way in which the film makers approach this subject is wonderfully oblique—through a son’s love for his mother. In the process, the movie very gently raises the time-honoured question “What is truth?” In the process, we get an inside look at what East German lost and gained from the big Coca-Cola freedom it won.