by MATTHEW HAYS

Wolfgang Becker's latest film, Good Bye, Lenin!, is one of those beautifully surprising arthouse films. Forget the recent spate of gruellingly broad comedies to emanate from Germany, this feature offers an intelligently rendered portrait of a contemporary Deutsch family, gently reflecting the innate absurdity of the nation's own fractured history. (A less pleasant surprise was that the film wasn't even nominated for a best foreign language film Oscar, joining Osama on this year's mysterious omissions list.)

The essential premise for Good Bye, Lenin! is a stroke of inspired genius. In Cold War East Berlin, a family struggles to stay together, despite the hardships of living under communist rule. The young family's father, unable to cope with the oppression, flees to the West, leaving his wife and children behind. Mom (Katrin Sass) suffers a severe temporary emotional breakdown, later telling the children that the reason dad left was because he was having an affair with a mistress in the West.

Mom then suffers a severe head injury and lapses into a coma, where she remains for 13 years. Her two children, now adults, hadn't expected her to ever regain consciousness. They are warned that, although mom has come to, she has an incredibly weak heart, and any great strain to it could cause a fatal heart attack.

Thus her slightly crazy but loving son, played by famous German actor Daniel Bruhl, decides to recreate Germany's past for her, making her believe that the Berlin Wall still stands and that Eastern Germany has proven so successful that downtrodden Westerners from a rotting capitalist system are dying to cross the Wall to join their comrades.

It's a funny, genre-defying little gem of a film, as full of whimsy as it is melancholy. Becker confirms that, while making a film about contemporary Germany, no one genre can fit the mould. "I really wanted to avoid prototypical genres with this film," the affable Becker says, sipping on a Perrier at the Café Melies in Ex-Centris. "It couldn't just be funny, or sad, or melancholic. It had to be changing constantly, like my life. My life is not a genre. Let's face it: sometimes life is absurd. When you feel like crying, sometimes you laugh."

Avoiding catastrophe

Becker, who won an Oscar for a student film he made in his early filmmaking years, says he simply couldn't see himself making a standard-issue Berlin-Wall-falling-down feature. "I would never accept a treatment were it a simple account of reunification. No way. Really, that would probably end up one step away from an American catastrophe movie. You have an earthquake, or as in the case of The Day After, an atom bomb. Everyone is affected by the same phenomenon, and you just take ten different stereotypes. You have the old couple sacrificing themselves, so the young can live. You have the couple who's close to splitting up get back together because of the crisis. You could do that as a funny parody, I suppose, but I'm not that interested in that either.

"What I think interests me most is the reflection of history in the lives of a few people, say a family. What is Gone With the Wind? Is it a film about the Civil War or a woman who must make a choice between a man and another man? It's both. It's about the big winds of history blowing through a small living room."

The comedy of politics

Key to Good Bye, Lenin! is its keen, comic ideological commentary. Becker doesn't let anyone off the hook, from the reprehensible communist officials to the rather lackluster opportunities offered East Germans after reunification (key characters end up working at Burger King). "Growing up in the West, I had a lot of socialist ideals as a young man. And I still do. But after the Wall came down, it became quite clear that the East German officials had been even worse than suspicions had it. Then when the Westerners arrived, they were very eager capitalists who ripped off many of the unsuspecting Easterners, who were quite naïve.

"There really is no reason to favour either side in representing them, something that's reflected in the film, for sure."

Good Bye, Lenin! opens Friday, March 12

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