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Goodbye Lenin!
**
Capsule-length
Cinema Review - October 7, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. Germany.
121 minutes. Directed by Wolfgang Becker. Produced by . Written by Wolfgang
Becker, Bernd Lichtenberg. Starring Daniel Brühl, Katrin Saß,
Maria Simon, Chulpan Khamatova, Florian Lukas, Alexander Beyer, Burghart
Klaußner, Michael Gwisdek.
It starts off as a cute little comedy-drama about
a family living in East Germany, 1989. Then the mother goes into a coma,
and wakes up nine months later, after the Berlin Wall has come down. Doc
says she's not to have any excitement, so the son goes to enormous lengths
of redecoration, object hunting, television faking and simple lying in order
to keep her calm.
And it goes on and on, for 121 minutes. There
isn't any real commentary on how the changes in society felt at the time;
the story isn't a symbol for anything, and the backdrop is typical snatching
at random political significance by filmmakers who know how to get festival
audiences talking. "Goodbye Lenin" just turns into a stupid
and pointless comedy of errors about a kid who has to find increasingly
ridiculous reasons to keep his mother from being told some fairly important
news. Me, I reckon she would be less stressed out by the truth than her family's
weird, strained behaviour and the crazy stories they keep coming up with
to cover up inconsistencies in the atmosphere. But hey.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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