Arts

Film: Good Bye, Lenin!

It's too long, and I'm not sure it deserves Empire's **** review, but Good Bye, Lenin! is an interesting film that's well worth watching if you don't mind a few rough corners.

Waking from a coma during which the Berlin Wall fell, Alex's mother is at risk of a fatal heart attack if she is excited. For the sake of her health, Alex hides the revolution from his mother, re-creating the DDR in her flat.

Rather than dwelling on the emotional significance of reunification, the film provides an alternate angle on November 1989. Through the net curtains of East Berlin, it peeks out a world that's changing at an alarming pace: favourite produce is no longer available, commercial enterprise is everywhere. A sense of fear of the unknown is presented, perhaps for the first time for western audiences.

And it's this angle that interested me most about the film. I'm rapidly coming to appreciate how one-sided my world-view has been over the years. It's wonderful to see cinema provoke and question views I'd held tightly.

I can't list them all, but I'm finding myself more interested in films with a historical presence. Films such as Billy Elliot and Brassed Off show alternate views of the miners' strike; Max shows an interesting fiction around Hitler's early days.

It's interesting to wonder what the future will teach us about present days. Of the techniques used in the Iraq conflict, Iraqi blogger Salam Pax says "Way to go uncle Sam. This is going to make one hell of a James Bond movie.". True enough, but it's the films made in ten years that I'll be waiting for.