Film — Goodbye, Lenin!

Took in a late showing of Goodbye, Lenin! last night; a comedy of Ostalgie, nostalgia for the old certainties of the Cold War partition in Germany - a woman from East Berlin who has been a stalwart of socialism falls into a coma in October 1989, and doesn't waken until the next summer (after the fall of the Berlin wall); to stave off another, likely fatal, attack she must be kept in bed, and protected from shocks (like the fall of the DDR, for example).

Hollywood has forgotten how to do films like this, going for gross-out or schmaltz instead. There were a few moments of general audience laughter, as a her son goes to increasingly frantic attempts to maintain the illusion that nothing has changed, culminating in an over the top attempt to disguise the reunification celebrations as the triumph of socialism, but nothing forced beyond the premise.

[Now playing - Silver Mt. Zion - Take these hands and throw them in the river]