Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #888 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-09-03
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1

DVD Description
The year is 1989 and East and West Germany are still divided. Alex (Daniel Bruhl) and his sister Ariane (Maria Simon) live in East Germany with their single mother, Christiane (Katrin Sass) who is a staunch Socialist. When Alex’s mother witnesses his arrest on a protest march, she suffers a heart attack and falls into a coma for eight months, just enough time for the Berlin Wall to come tumbling down, along with all of East Germany’s ideals. Eight months later, Christiane wakes up and things have changed. The doctors warn Alex that any shock could bring on a fatal heart attack. He then realizes he must convince his mother that her beloved Communism has not been overthrown but is in fact triumphing over Capitalism. Alex then sets out to recreate every detail of the old East inside the four walls of their tiny council flat … what begins as a little white lie soon turns into a major deception with hilarious consequences!

Customer Reviews

a political comedy of first order
Suffering a heart attack and falling into a coma after seeing her son arrested during a protest, Alex's (Daniel Brühl) socialist mother, Christiane (Katrin Sass), remains comatose through the fall of the Berlin wall and the German Democratic Republic. Knowing that the slightest shock could prove fatal upon his mother's awakening, Alex strives to keep the fall of the GDR a secret for as long as possible. He pulls off an elaborate scheme to keep his mother in good health by keeping their apartment firmly rooted in the past and the GDR alive.

Good Bye Lenin's premise seems to be a recipe for disaster. It could have ended in total disaster turning it into a cheap comedy. A little more than 10 years after the fall of the wall and sensitivities still rough this movie however avoids all this and balanced not just comedy and drama, but also the political and the personal. Learning about and understanding the former GDR without but not falling into nostalgia is pretty well done. The comedy is never ridiculous as much of the amusement comes from Daniel Brühl's increasingly desperate attempts to maintain a pre-Wall facade. Maybe such a movie achieves more than serious documentaries. It was huge success and one can easy understand why... well, if one understands German. I am afraid the subtitles do not really work. I enjoyed it very much.

An honest film about lying
Although marketed as an all-out comedy, Goodbye, Lenin! is in many ways more of a feelgood tragicomedy about the nature of lies rather than a laugh-a-minute sidesplitter. Certainly the premise has all the makings of farce as East German Daniel Bruhle has to go to increasingly desperate lengths to keep the news that communism and the Berlin Wall have both fallen from his Party activist mother when she emerges from a coma for fear the shock will cause a fatal heart attack. Since the pace of change to Western values and fashions has been so rapid that means finding their apartment's long discarded drab furniture, seeking out now discontinued East German brands of pickles and coffee and even faking DDR news reports with his fellow satellite TV installer as he tries to recreate the old East Germany within the borders of his mother's bedroom (not so easy with Coca Cola setting up shop just across the road), in the process gradually creating the more reasonable DDR he wished had existed. The laughs are there but less frequent than you'd expect, and often underlined with the sadness of a country suddenly forced to confront years of deprivation and betrayal: his sister's revelation of the first words their long-absent father spoke to her is initially funny but genuinely tragic on reflection, and the film manages to pull off both reactions without over-milking them. Nor does it sugar-coat the ending, opting for something rather more affecting than a simple Happy Ever After. Chalk up another quiet winner for the 21st Century German film industry Renaissance.

The only real extra is the rather good German theatrical trailer.

Excellent Story (Could be deemed to have spoilers)
The late 80s was a very significant time for German people on either side of the Iron Curtain, East Germans controlled by Communism, and the West Germans controlled by democracy. The biggest problem for both was the wall, they all hated it, as they couldn't travel between East and West Berlin without some sort of documentary evidence.

There was no Coca Cola, McDonald's or Burger King in East Germany, it was all controlled by SED - and they didn't really like western products in the Eastern Bloc.

Christiane Kerner (Katrin Saß) was part of that movement - she was quite a believer in the movement, but her son Alex (Daniel Brühl) didn't really want a split Germany. He went on the protest marches - and his mother spotted him. In shock, she had a heart attack, and now laid in a coma.

Alex does everything he can to help her, but during the coma, The Berlin Wall is knocked down, and West Germany is now linked with East, to form Germany as we know it today. Burger King is now there, and Alex himself becomes a satellite fitter. To save mum having another episode - he has to keep her world as East Germany.

This is a really good movie, even though he's lying to his mother, it's all really funny and done only to save her from dying. I thought the TV reports was the best thing about the film, the way they filmed them themselves to fool his mother into believing that the SED was still going strong. Both leads were excellent, and his girlfriend in the movie; Lara (Chulpan Khamatova ) but really all the cast was very good.

One thing I didn't like about this transfer is the subtitles, as the frames are often very light, the colour of the subs didn't make it easy on the eye to read what was being said, so I had to rely on good old Latin and words that sounded English when it wasn't easy to read the screen. I am surprised they didn't change the colour of the subtitles, as it's very easy to do on a PC nowadays.

The picture and sound was very good though, with a 5.1 mix that was great when the helicopters came over with the head floating in the air.

The extras are not good, only the trailer is on here, which is a real shame - a few interviews would have been superb. Really there's little they could have added otherwise.

Worth a look, it's a light-hearted movie that made me laugh and feel sad at the same time.