Word: leninism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...democracy riots and cheering mobs of happy Germans are the images most often associated with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Director Wolfgang Becker aims to capture a unique aspect of the event in his critically acclaimed film Goodbye, Lenin!, by depicting the effects of German reunification on everyday people. The most commercially successful German film in history, its theme echoes that of an earlier German epic, Das Versprechen (The Promise), but Becker steers Goodbye Lenin! far away from that film’s largely stifled emotions...
However, Brecker does not use his ample talent solely for humor’s sake. Goodbye, Lenin! is dotted with distilled illustrations of the many facets of the reunification, some of which shine much brighter than others. When Alex and Lara look for a place to live together, they soon realize that mass exodus to the West has turned East Berlin into a veritable ghost town of cast-off responsibilities and forgotten dreams. In one powerful scene, the two of them prance through an abandoned apartment, a lavishly appointed mausoleum that is as empty as the socialist dream...
Good Bye, Lenin!, a huge hit in Germany and across Europe, may sound like sitcom stuff, a wacky mistaken-identity plot inflated to national dimensions. In fact, as handled with expert tenderness by director and co-writer Wolfgang Becker, the trope works splendidly as both political metaphor and love story. If some Iraqis can look back with a twisted longing on the more orderly days of Saddam's rule, why can't East Germans get a little misty over the Honecker regime? As they do. It's called Ostalgie, or Eastalgia. The film taps the universal suspicion that whatever...
...Alex's expression of gratitude for the years Christiane devoted to raising him and an early shouldering of the responsibility a son may assume when a parent declines and the child becomes the caregiver. With the narrative briskness of Amelie and a nimble political savvy, Good Bye, Lenin! is a romantic comedy so smart and sweetly mature, it's liberating. --By Richard Corliss
...make art-house movies for international juries instead of more popular crowd pleasers - which could hurt the popularity of German film back home. Last year the market share for local films in local cinemas rose to 17.5% (up from 11.9% in 2002) thanks mainly to the hits Good Bye Lenin! and The Miracle of Bern. "The problem is that we in Europe see film as a cultural product and not as a commercial product," he says. "That limits mass appeal of a film and that's why people don't go to the cinema." Will these bills make a difference...