Another film where a lead character stops talking. Yesterday it was Persona's Elizabet Volgner, today it is Goodbye, Lenin's Frau Kerner, who is gobsmacked after her husband's 1978 defection to the west. Not because he left the family for a floozy, as she came to tell her children, but because she was too scared to apply for an exit visa so that she and the children could join him.
This lie, which she reveals to her children before her death at the end of the film, is intended to braid with the lie her son Alex maintained after she came out of a coma nine months after the Wall came down, when East Berlin, where this film is set, was no longer the worker's paradise that Frau Kerner, a school teacher, served "too idealistically," according to her former boss, but a place of hyperbolic transition. Alex's lie is that the DDR is not dissolving but in fact thriving, swelling with West Germans fleeing the pornographic popcorn that is capitalism, and he does everything he can to protect his weak-hearted mother from a reality that could, quite literally, shock her to death.
Goodbye, Lenin is a film I had heard about for years and had imagined differently. For example, I imagined the mother and son to be older, the mother closer to a wisecracking Ruth Gordon than the limited yet distractingly attractive Katrin Sass. And then there's the question, Are Germans funny? Which of course they are. But when Germans try to be English funny or American funny, something very unfunny happens, and the problem as I see it has less to do with easy laughs than it does with our ability to appreciate the spectrum of the thoughtful (often ironic) proposition that only Germans seem capable of, where all responses are in play, an effect that can sometimes leave me -- speechless.
No comments:
Post a Comment