‘Lenin’ offers humor, triumph

Funny but not a comedy, serious but never overbearing, emotional in an engaging and bittersweet way, “Good Bye, Lenin!” is a wonderful film unto itself about a world unto itself, the self-contained universe of the German Democratic Republic, better known as East Germany.

A monster hit in today’s reunified Germany, where it’s been the most popular film since “Run Lola Run,” “Good Bye, Lenin!” has also touched a chord all across the continent. It won three of the five prestigious European Film Awards it was nominated for, even besting art house favorite “Dirty Pretty Things” to be named best picture.

Directed and cowritten by Wolfgang Becker, “Good Bye, Lenin!” has been successful because of what it deals with as well as the way it deals with it. It’s a personal look at perhaps the most extraordinary public and political event of the last quarter century: the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the Communist system, the humbling of a god that failed.

With its distinctly human viewpoint on the dismantling of what is often perceived as an inhuman system, “Good Bye, Lenin!” does more than reveal what those profound social changes meant for the people who lived through them. Able to bring lightness to serious issues and emotions, the film doesn’t hesitate to offer poignantly mixed feelings about both the socialist world that is no more and the capitalist one that’s triumphantly replaced it.

Setting that overall tone is a tongue-in-cheek yet good-humored voice-over, written by Bernd Lichtenberg and director Becker and spoken by twentysomething East Berlin resident Alex Kerner, excellently played by Daniel Bruhl.

Though “Good Bye, Lenin!” has a great plot hook, it’s not in a rush to get there, instead showing us what life in the GDR was like for Alex and his family. Rather than being nostalgic and sentimental, the film’s take on those times is gently mocking yet always respectful and clear-eyed.

Alex especially remembers the day in 1978 when the first East German went into space because that was also the day his father abandoned his wife, son and daughter and fled to the West. After that, Alex says, his mother, Christiane (Katrin Sass, herself a former East German star), “was married to the socialist fatherland.”

A passionate crusader for social justice, Christiane worried about the workers of Mozambique and served her neighbors as a writer of world-class letters of complaint to the state. If your underwear didn’t fit or your maternity clothes were too garish, she was there for you.

All this changes in 1989. Right before the fall of the wall, Christiane has a heart attack and goes into a coma. In a delicious concept, she sleeps through those enormous changes, through, in Alex’s words, “the biggest eight months in modern German history....Everything she believed in vanished in just a few months.”

Christiane does wake up but in such a precarious state that, her doctor warns Alex, she might not survive the next few weeks. Excitement of any kind would be seriously life-threatening, and that very much includes news of “the relentless triumph of capitalism” and the end of the system that meant so much to her.

Determined not to let this happen, Alex, who works for a satellite TV company, devotes most of his waking hours to re-creating the gone world of East Germany for his bedridden mother. He coerces his sister, Ariane (Maria Simon), who quit college to work at Burger King, to help and even risks complicating his budding romance with comely Russian nursing student Lara (Chulpan Khamatova).

In ways that are too delicious to reveal, Alex, like a great counterpuncher, resorts to increasingly elaborate subterfuges and charades to deal with his mother’s increasing worries that things are somehow not quite right with her world. Actor Bruhl brings such passion and conviction to his actions that you accept them no matter how outlandish they become.

As Alex struggles to bring this lost and often reviled civilization back to life to save his mother, “Good Bye, Lenin!” quietly comes into its own. It gradually reveals to us the emotional quality of a socialist lifestyle, the often forgotten value of this theoretically egalitarian society with the motto of “quality supplied by all to all.”

While not quarreling with the idea that, given its repressive, totalitarian nature, the end of the East German experiment was not to be regretted, this film reminds us that something good was nevertheless lost in its demise. As the film’s characters metaphorically -- and, in a beautiful image, quite literally -- say goodbye to Lenin and hello to raging capitalism, they, and we, can’t help but reflect on the value of an idealistic credo that believed there was more to life than new cars and newer DVDs. It’s a lesson that Americans, perhaps, need to learn as much as anyone.

*

‘Good Bye, Lenin!’

MPAA rating: R, for brief language and sexuality

Times guidelines: mature subject matter

Daniel Bruhl ... Alex Kerner

Katrin Sass ... Christiane Kerner

Chulpan Khamatova ... Lara

Maria Simon ... Ariane

Florian Lukas ... Denis

A Sony Pictures Classics release. Director Wolfgang Becker. Producer Stefan Arndt. Screenplay Bernd Lichtenberg, Wolfgang Becker. Cinematographer Martin Kukula. Editor Peter R. Adam. Costumes Aenne Plaumann. Music Yann Tiersen. Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes.

In limited release.