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Alex Kerner (Daniel Brühl) was a typical East German kid back when East Germany existed. His dad had fled for the West first chance he got, while his mom (Katrin Sass) had tried to counter that by being the perfect Communist comrade, teaching children how to sing hymns of the republic and generally staying on the straight and narrow party line. It had been a decent childhood for Alex, who watched in awe as his boyhood hero was shot into space and listened to the TV telling him how East Germany was the envy of the world.

But one day it all got clearer. The East Germans figured out they'd been had, and the Berlin Wall began to crumble. And that's where this story grows legs.

Amidst riots and protests, Alex finds himself in the clutches of the East German police, as his mother looks on. The cops throw Alex into a truck, mom faints, and ends up in a coma for eight months. When she awakes, the doctors advise Alex that any sort of shock could kill her, so the teenager recruits his family, neighbors and friends to pretend that Communism is still in place. This means faked TV telecasts, western bloc food shoved into old eastern bloc food containers, hidden Burger King drive-thru uniforms and the worst furniture on the block.

Writer/director Wolfgang Becker manages to make this mostly unbelievable story seem like an everyday occurence by keeping the slapstick to a minimum, and basing the piece around the always rational, eternally calm even in the eye of a storm, Katrin Sass. I don't recall Sass having a funny line in the film, but all around her is a constantly moving, ducking and weaving group of people who want nothing more than for her to be healthy, and for that to happen they must build lie upon lie upon lie.

It's a damn shame that the Academy has allowed the foreign film category to become such a corrupt mess that films as good as Good Bye, Lenin, Osama and Y Tu Mama Tambien can be ignored in favor of clearly inferior alternatives. Good Bye, Lenin is simply fantastic European cinema that deserves all the praise that can be heaped on it. And your ten bucks.

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originally posted: 03/20/04 12:42:37
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