It's hard to know which most contributes to our delusions about life: the lies we are told by our friends and family, the propaganda fed us by our governments, or the lies by which we deceive ourselves. Here's a film from German director Wolfgang Becker that will have you mulling over the whole issue of deception.

Historical Background: Wolfgang Becker was born June 22nd, 1954, in Hemer, Westphalia, Germany. He studied history and literature before entering and graduating from the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie (Academy of Cinema and Television) in Berlin. He then began working at filmmaking as a writer, cinematographer, and director. His debut feature film as a director, Schmetterling ("Butterflies") (1988), won the Golden Leopard award at Lucerne. It also took an Oscar for Best Student Film. Next came Tatort: Blutwurstwalzer ("Waltz of the Roll") (1991), which was made for German television. His third film, Kinderspiele ("Child's Play") (1992), won a Silver Leopard award. His fourth film, from a production company (X-Films Creative Pool) that Becker helped found, entitled Das Leben ist eine Baustelle ("Life is All You Get") (1997), was in competition at the Berlin Film Festival.

Becker has had a long professional partnership with director Tom Tykwer (see Run Lola Run). Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) helped establish Becker's international reputation on something of a par with Tykwer. It took the Best European Film award at the European Film Festival as well as a Blue Angel at the Berlin Film Festival, a César award for Best European Film, and was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign Film Category. It was also selected by the London Critics' Circle as Best Non-English Film. In 2004, Becker made one of the segments of the film Welcome to São Paulo.

The Story: The plot is built on a rather interesting, if implausible, premise. In East Germany, the Kerner family is the model of a happy, nuclear family in the summer of 1978, enjoying playful times together at their weekend cottage. The family is composed of the father, Robert (Burghart Klauß), the mother, Christiane (Katrin Saß), daughter Ariane (Maria Simon), and son Alex (Daniel Brühl). The idyllic life of the children comes crashing down around them when their father defects to the West, apparently abandoning his family for an "enemy-of-the-state girlfriend," or so their mother lets them believe. The mother suffers an extended nervous breakdown, lasting some eight weeks, during which time she is virtually catatonic and mute.

When she recovers, she throws herself into devotion to her two children and social activism within the precepts of the socialist state. In the eyes of her son Alex, who also serves as narrator for the film, she remarried to the socialist fatherland, and since the relationship was asexual, she had a lot of energy for her kids. She becomes a passionate crusader for the common people, writing polite missives to socialist authorities to complain about design flaws in various production goods, such as overly colorful maternity outfits and slacks cut overly square. She even receives a medal for her devoted citizenship.

The film then skips forward eleven years to October of 1989. Alex has taken a job with a television repair company and the 40th anniversary of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is fast approaching. So too is the fall of the Berlin Wall, though none of the characters have any inkling yet of that momentous development. Ariane is an unwed mother and sometimes leaves the baby with Alex when she goes to work.

Although Christiane is a devoted socialist, Ariane and, especially, Alex are caught up in the youth movement. Alex joins a march for freedom of the press and the right to come and go beyond the confines of the Berlin Wall. During the march, Alex chokes on a piece of an apple he is nibbling and draws the attention of a girl, Lara (Chulpan Khamatove), who is marching beside him. Before they can even swap names, the riot police arrive to break up the rally. Alex gets arrested with a slew of other marchers, under the gaze of his mother, who happens to be passing by on her way to a get-together of party bigwigs. Alex sees his mother apparently faint on the pavement, but he is unable to get to her, since he is being unceremoniously loaded onto a paddy wagon.

Alex is soon released from police custody because, it turns out, his mother has suffered a heart attack. At the hospital, he learns from his sister that his mother is in a coma from which she may never emerge. Alex devotedly attends his mother's bedside, day after day, all the more avidly when it transpires that the angelic Lara is a student nurse (from the Soviet Union) working at that hospital. Christiane's coma is prolonged, during which time momentous changes overtake her cherished socialist republic. The Berlin Wall topples, Eric Honecker resigns, Deutschmarks become the new currency, and capitalism invades East Germany in the form of Coca-Cola and McDonalds. Apartments are quickly westernized with art deco and the old pasteboard East German décor is cast out. Ariane takes a job at a McDonalds and gains a live-in Western boyfriend (Alexander Beyer). The TV-repair shop where Alex had been working folds, but he gets a job selling satellite dishes just in time for the appearance of the German team in the world championship.

Miraculously, Christiane regains consciousness after being comatose for eight months. Her doctor warns that she is still in danger and that any shock could do her in. Alex decides that protecting his mother's life hinges on preventing her from learning that her beloved GDR and its socialist principles no longer exist. Since she remains bed-ridden, Alex scrambles to redecorate her room precisely as it had been before the onslaught of Westernization. He recovers the abandoned tacky furniture and the framed photos of Communist icons, recreating a world that in just eight months time has virtually disappeared. Maintaining the ruse becomes increasingly difficult, however. Christiane requests, for example, her favorite foods, such as Spreewald pickles, but they can no longer be found, having been replaced by the cheaper and better products of capitalism. He searches high and low for leftovers and even empty jars with the requisite labels. The neighbors shake their heads in disappointment when he's seen rummaging through the trash, like a homeless beggar.

When his mother asks repeatedly for a television in her room, Alex begins to construct, with the aid of his friend and colleague, Denis (Florian Lukas), phony news broadcasts that will perpetuate the myth that he's created for his mother. When Christiane spots a coca-cola banner unfurling on a building outside her window, Alex and Denis creatively invent a news story about how the formula for coca-cola was actually invented in East Germany. One day, Christiane manages to get out of bed and goes for a short walk. She is quite naturally amazed to see Western goods and automobiles in abundance in the street. Alex and Denis later invent a story about the generosity of the GDR receiving refugees from the excesses of Western consumerism. During Christiane's walk, a statue of Lenin hanging from a helicopter flies by (in an obvious reference to Fellini), with its arm outstretched toward Christiane as though either pleading for her help or inviting her to join him, in his demise.

One day, Ariane is shocked to find her own father in the drive-through lane at the McDonalds where she works. She conceals her identity from him but later tells Alex. Christiane, in the meantime, asks Alex to take her for a visit to their old weekend cottage. Alex manages to pull it off by claiming, first, that they've finally received the Trabant (a legendarily shoddy East German vehicle that citizens waited years to get) they had requested and by insisting that Christiane wear a blindfold during the ride. At the old cottage, Christiane confesses that she had lied about the circumstances under which their father had disappeared. He had been harassed by Communist party officials for not being a member of the party and had finally decided to defect. She was to follow with the children but was afraid of repercussions. She had also hidden the many letters he had sent to both herself and the children, preferring that the children view him as the villain in the breakup of the family, rather than herself. Christiane expresses the wish of seeing her ex-husband one last time. Alex and Ariane feel hurt about having been lied to, conveniently overlooking that fact that they are currently engaging in a similar activity themselves.

Christiane takes a turn for the worse and arrives at her final days. Alex tracks down his father and asks him to grant his mother's dying wish for one last reconciliation. He asks Robert to play along with the falsehoods about the situation in East Germany. Lara, however, unbeknownst to Alex, has taken it upon herself to bring Christiane up-to-date with reality. Christiane and Lara apparently decide, however, that they should let Alex believe that Christiane still doesn't know what changes have transpired. Alex and Denis create one last fanciful fake television broadcast, reflecting Alex's imaginary and idealized version of reconciliation between East and West Germany, with East Germany taking the initiative and leading the way. Christiane is content to let Alex persist in his believe that he has protected her from the truth. The deceiver thus becomes the deceived.

Themes: Good Bye, Lenin! is a thematically rich film, delving into politics, family dynamics, and, most especially, propaganda, lies, and self-deception. The fall of the Berlin Wall was a tumultuous event for East Germany, triggering rapid changes in every aspect of the lives of the people who lived there. Overnight, the economy would be transformed from a socialist system to a capitalist one, Western consumer goods and ideas would come flooding in (for better and for worse), and people could pass freely into the Western sector of the city and beyond. Becker takes an exceptionally even-handed approach to depicting the turmoil, presenting both the benefits and the costs for the East Germans. For the young people, it spelled new opportunity. For many of the older folks in the eastern half of Germany, it was the destruction of all that they had strove to achieve for forty years. The quality of consumer goods quickly improved but along with it came the evidences of Western decadence, excesses of consumerism, and a bit of dehumanization. The socialist way of life was crushed by capitalism. Some cheered while others mourned. One old man in the film groans, "Forty years gone! They sold us up the river!" Some viewers may believe that communism isn't worth mourning and I might agree. It was defective, as an economic system, in some respects . . . but, then, so too is capitalism. For that matter, the concentration of wealth among a small percentage of individuals in America has revealed some serious kinks in that vaunted social system we call "democracy." Many of us spend a lifetime working within systems that are partly effective and partly defective, be it a company or country or a social group. Many of the individuals who work within defective systems are nevertheless good people, trying to counter the defects and make that system better. It must have been painful to those like Christiane, who had tried their level best to make the GDR a better country, to see the entire system collapse overnight, and, thus, their life's work washed away in a landslide.

That much of the value of this film will surely be more relevant to those who live in Germany or nearby Eastern European Soviet bloc countries than for those who viewed the cataclysmic events only from a distance. Becker adds an element of universality to the movie by anchoring the issues in the dynamics of an individual family. Family relationships are something with which we can all identify. Viewers who don't sympathize with a nostalgic view of the old communist society in East Germany will nevertheless respond to the devotion of a son to his mother and generational differences in how people respond to change. Christiane is an idealist, not merely dedicated to perpetuation of Communist ideology but to improving the lot of the common people within the system. Roger Ebert states that the film "never quite addresses the self-deception which causes Christiane to support the communist regime in the first place," but it is no different, in kind, than the self-deception that allows many Americans to support the belligerence, bigotry, and suborning of torture practiced by the current rightwing administration in the U.S.

In my opinion, what the movie is most about is the issue of lying, both one individual to another and, in its more systematic form, governmental propaganda. Alex decides that he knows what is best for his mother. He convinces himself that he needs to "protect" her from the truth, in order to keep her alive. He could have instead brought her up-to-date with the changes incrementally, over a period of a few days or weeks, but instead choice the route of deceit, even when the effort to maintain the falsehood became increasingly complex. "Somehow," says Alex, "my scheme took on a life of its own." Who was the deceit actually serving? In my opinion, Alex was mainly catering to his own needs. First, he needed to feel that he was doing something for his mother and, second, he needed to hold on to the image that he cherished of his mother as a champion of the old social order. "My mother's room resounded with the melody of yesterday," says Alex. When Christiane and Lara ultimately choose not to inform Alex that his mother has learned the truth about the changes in Eastern Germany (a development that most viewers and reviewers overlook), it is because they have realized that it is Alex who requires the deception, not Christiane. Alex is not sufficiently self-aware to recognize either the motivations behind his elaborate ruse or the hypocrisy inherent in his resenting his mother's deception about his father while engaging in a campaign of deception himself.

Governments take it upon themselves to deceive not only their enemies but their own populaces, in much the same way as Alex deceived his mother, but on a grander scale. The American government, for example, arranges to have the remains of American soldiers killed in Iraq arrive home in the middle of the night to minimize press coverage. One can imagine the conversations leading to such decisions: "We have to protect the American people from losing their will to win." The reality, of course, is that the decision is mainly intended to minimize opposition to the policies of the current administration. The real motivation behind propaganda is ensuring that those in power remain in power. The fear is that access to the truth will change minds and diminish support. The current American government encouraged the perception among the American people of a link between Iraq and the attack on the World Trade Center to bolster acquiescence to their plan to invade Iraq. Innuendo may be relatively subtle, but its still propaganda. Good Bye, Lenin! covers some of the same thematic territory as Emir Kurturica's Underground in relation to the issue of information manipulation.

Like Alex, the East German communist government used systematic disinformation to manipulate beliefs. One reviewer glibly describes the leadership of East Germany as "the kind of propagandists that disappeared when the Berlin Wall came down." Don't you believe it! To assume that such propagandists existed only in the communist countries is to set yourself up to be victimized by the propaganda of the governments of your own respective countries. Politics, throughout the world, is the business of manipulating information to encourage support for the agendas of those in power. If propaganda techniques in the Western democracies are a shade subtler than those in the old communist bloc nations, they are merely more dangerous for being so. In America, we once had news broadcasts and print media that provided real journalism and independent analysis. Now, many of those information outlets have been bought up by the moneyed interests and reflexively support jingoism and other aspects of the conservative agenda.

Possibly the most dangerous propaganda is the kind we construct for ourselves. In his fake newscasts, Alex gradually reconstructs the old GDR to more fully comport with his image of what it should have been. Gradually, he transforms it into a more people-centered and compassionate system than it ever really was, just as Americans and other nationalities around the world idealize and mythologize their own counties and systems into something of which they can be proud. Americans, for example, tout the ideals of freedom, rights, and productivity, while suppressing awareness of imperialism, exploitation, class disparities, spoiling of the environment, lack of social services for the needy, detainment without due process, and authorization of torture.

Production Values: The script for Good Bye, Lenin!, written by Becker and Bernd Lichtenberg, has both strengths and weaknesses. On the positive side, there's plenty of good humor inherent in the elaborate fabrications in which Alex must engage to maintain his fiction. There are also plenty of opportunities for satirical potshots at the extremes of both the communist and capitalist systems. Several of the characters are developed into interesting and multifaceted individuals with whom we can empathize or identify. The script also effectively captures a moment in history that had special significance. What it lacks is effective pacing (it drags at times) and, most importantly, clarity during the denouement. Becker glosses over one of the most important developments of the film (Lara revealing the truth to Christiane) so abruptly that many viewers are left wondering how much she found out before she died. The point should have been reinforced (for example, by some meaningful exchanges of eye contact between Lara and Christiane later on), since it significantly deepens the thematic content of the film.

The art direction for the sets was outstanding, recreating in great detail the time periods just before and just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The cinematography was rather ordinary.

Daniel Brühl provided a sympathetic performance as Alex. It's hard not to like a guy who is devoted to his mother, even if his manner of expressing that devotion is terribly flawed. Katrin Saß, playing the charcter who, on the surface, appears to be the least psychologically stable, ends up providing the story's quiet focus. She is the center of the maelstrom around which the other characters circle.

Bottom-Line: There's a healthy package of extras with the Sony Pictures Classics DVD, starting with Becker's own German-language commentary track. He explains many of the cultural elements that might not be obvious to American and some Western European viewers. There's also a more casual commentary track featuring two of the members of the cast, Katrin Saß and Daniel Brühl. Also included are some deleted scenes and a pair of featurettes, trailers, and uncut versions of some of the historical news broadcasts used in the film. This is a high quality film given a high quality DVD presentation. Good Bye, Lenin! is in German with English subtitles and has a running time of 121 minutes.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age