This is a German film about a young East German man in the late 1980s whose mother suffers a stroke. While she is unconscious the Berlin Wall is knocked down and Germany is re-unified. When his mother starts to recover, he is desperate not to shock her into a relapse by revealing the truth, and constructs an elaborate fantasy in which East Germany still exists.
Throughout the film, he persists in his efforts to keep his carefully constructed fiction alive in the mind of his mother, and goes to ever more extreme lengths to maintain the illusion. He enlists the help of a friend to construct some fake news footage, and their combined efforts are a success, but the lie is now too big to allow them to turn back, and it seems as if the truth must come out eventually. When it does, will it be too big a shock for his mother to take?
One of the most telling sequences in the film is when his mother is shown TV pictures of West Germans flooding into the East. He tells her that the westerners have come because they finally realised the emptiness of consumerism, and have sought sanctuary in the communist East. Because this was such an attractive lie his mother was taken in. As well as showing how people can become blinkered to reality when it becomes too painful, this scene makes you think about all the East Germans who didn't celebrate when the wall came down. This point is subtly made, and is all the more effective for it.
Goodbye Lenin is a very effective and moving film, which explores how people deal with all kinds of change, whether just affecting a few, or the entire population of a country.
Throughout the film, he persists in his efforts to keep his carefully constructed fiction alive in the mind of his mother, and goes to ever more extreme lengths to maintain the illusion. He enlists the help of a friend to construct some fake news footage, and their combined efforts are a success, but the lie is now too big to allow them to turn back, and it seems as if the truth must come out eventually. When it does, will it be too big a shock for his mother to take?
One of the most telling sequences in the film is when his mother is shown TV pictures of West Germans flooding into the East. He tells her that the westerners have come because they finally realised the emptiness of consumerism, and have sought sanctuary in the communist East. Because this was such an attractive lie his mother was taken in. As well as showing how people can become blinkered to reality when it becomes too painful, this scene makes you think about all the East Germans who didn't celebrate when the wall came down. This point is subtly made, and is all the more effective for it.
Goodbye Lenin is a very effective and moving film, which explores how people deal with all kinds of change, whether just affecting a few, or the entire population of a country.