Say hello to JiFFest with 'Goodbye Lenin!`

Paul F. Agusta , Contributor/Jakarta, Pfa0109@yahoo.com

Goodbye Lenin! was the winner of the Best Film honor at the 2003, European Film Awards, as well as the Blue Angel award at the 2003 Berlin Film Festival.

It is guaranteed to whet the appetite of film audiences as the opener, on Friday, Dec. 3, of an excellent and varied lineup for this year's Jakarta International Film Festival (JiFFest).

At once indefinable and emotionally immediate, Goodbye Lenin! is a cinematic chameleon, slipping back and forth between definitions and genres, sometimes seemingly a political satire, then a family drama, and then an absurd comedy.

Director Wolfgang Becker focuses on the microscopic to explore the macroscopic as he tells the story of a small family divided by incompatible political ideologies and the changes wrought by time.

Rather than attempting a history lecture or expanding on what is right or wrong about the politics of Socialist East Germany (the GDR) or Capitalist West Germany, Becker's film plunges us into the lives of the Kerners: mother, Alex, Ariane, and briefly, the estranged father.

Set against the bold and inherently dramatic backdrop of East Berlin in the time around the fall of the infamous wall, Goodbye Lenin! confronts the audience with how one must feel when everything that once was black is now white, or several unfamiliar shades of gray.

Suddenly, one evening, stricken by a pretty face in an angry crowd, young Alex, played to perfection in a constant state of perplexity by Daniel Bruhl, plunges into anti-GDR protest, and is witnessed by his fanatically socialist mother, played with stoic conviction by Kathrin Sass, who promptly collapses from a coma- inducing heart attack.

Eight months later, the wall has fallen, Germany is on the verge of unification, Ariane, whom Alex describes as having "left the university to sell hamburgers", has moved a husband and a child into mother's now redecorated apartment, and Alex is working as a satellite TV installation tech, when mother awakens.

The doctors warn the children that mother must not experience any shocks or they may lose her for real this time. Alex reacts with frenetic energy geared at eradicating any signs of West German encroachment on his mother's long-time home by unsystematically "undecorating" the apartment.

With the help of family, friends and neighbors -- much to the disdain of Ariane -- Alex so convincingly (and hilariously) recreates Lenin's Germany in mother's bedroom that she doesn't realize the truth until one day, when the children are out, she decides she feels strong enough for an afternoon walk in her beloved East Berlin; a city that no longer exists.

The truth will out, so they say, but when it does, we find that mother has many more surprises for her children than they have for her.

Wolfgang Becker, better known as a cinematographer than as a director prior to Goodbye Lenin! introduces this story through strong characters, and takes off from there.

The ingrained social issues became apparent through the unfolding of the lives of the complex and conflicted characters, but because of the powerful depictions of the human soul, the social issues never weigh the film down.

In Goodbye Lenin! heavy themes never diminish the struggles the characters face as they come to grips with the precarious pitfalls of human existence.

In fact, Becker deftly sidesteps the inherent dangers of dealing with topics like politics, social struggles, ideology and death, by handling them simply in terms of human existence: little more than stones in the road of life that the weary traveler has to kick aside to continue his journey.