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It’s quite surprising for me that I was born into a divided world. We were divided on the basis of geography, class, society, community and in some cases, walls. I try to remember my first days of existence in this world. My memory obviously fails, sadly.
The question is, what do we imagine our world to be like? What happens if the image of the world begins to fall apart? What if it was merely a broken sheet of glass patched up in the fog? Hit the right note, and you can hear it crackle.
Goodbye Lenin isn’t a great movie by any means, but it tells a very beautiful story and provides a very interesting perspective of the events that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall in1989. Christiane Kerner (Katrin Saβ) a woman grown up on the vitality of a socialist regime in East Germany lies in a coma through the period of the fall of East Germany. She wakes up in a new world- the world on the other side of the glass door- a world where the socialism is only in dictionaries. Her son, Alex Kerner (Daniel Bruhl) constructs an East Germany in her bedroom fearing that the fall of the Berlin wall could possibly be her worst nightmare. He takes care of every possible detail from fabrication of the news on television to using food containers with East German labels.
Love walks into his life in the form a young nurse, Lara (Chulpan Khamatova). His sister, Ariane Kerner (Maria Simon) is pregnant with a West German boyfriend- a weak metaphor that the child born is not child of a divided country. But perhaps such clichéd occurrences and obvious intonations are the strengths of the movie. The narrative is very moving since it talks about how the life of a people changed in a matter of months. On the scale of a century, eight months, the period during which the woman was in coma seems miniscule. Time is fleeing, and eternity is only worth an hour.
Occasionally, a veteran of East Germany always walks past Alex when he rummages through the trash for old bottle labels and says, “Look what they have brought us to. Is this why we struggled for forty years” The movie tries to look at what the reunification of Germany did to its people. To text books, it created a chapter to be read many years later- The end of the cold war. To the people, such wars are pittance. The advent of capitalism swept aside the failing economy of East Germany and its people were hardly able to keep afloat in its waters. The East German mark had depreciated to fifty percent of its original value. It appears to me that the socialist government started the disintegration of East Germany and the capitalist influx merely accelerated this process. Cosmonauts of the former socialist regime were now taxi drivers. Alex’s childhood hero was now counting change.
Art is a reflection of our times. It is the only way to hear of a story that never happened. It is the only way for us to even attempt to answer the question ‘why’. (In my view, this isn’t a scientific question but rather philosophical. Kurt Vonnegut would have said, ‘there is no ‘why’, there only ‘is’ when he alludes to the inanity of the interrogative.) No matter.
The movie ends on a sentimental note, Alex in monologue says, “She’s up there somewhere now. Maybe looking down at us. Maybe she sees us as tiny specks on the Earth’s surface, just like Sigmund Jähn did back then. The country my mother left behind was a country she believed in; a country we kept alive till her last breath; a country that never existed in that form; a country that, in my memory, I will always associate with my mother.” And that’s what the world of East Germany was. A world in the memory of a woman trapped in a room. Perhaps all she needed to do to see the world; was to open the door.
The movie is directed by Wolfgang Becker and features appealing performances by all its actors. Lara, Alex’s girlfriend is very appealing and stands a voice of reason in the imaginary world that Alex so meticulously and tirelessly builds through the movie but that’s simply a bias I happen to have.
The winds from the seas of Oscar are blowing across. I love user powered content and I guess for movies IMDB rocks! So I went by to take a look at user ratings in IMDB on the best and worst movies of 2006.
Borat is a obvious contender for both awards! One of the most scandalous movies to hit big screen in recent times, Borat takes South park to a whole new level! Neverthless, a must watch by my standards!
Anyways, the whole list is a bundle of contradictions put together.
After a really long time, I got to watch a movie that I was very curious about. The movie had all the offerings of a dark depressing world best experienced over a few shots of vodka and a half finished glass of Jack Daniels. I really liked the bleakness that Brave New world by Aldous Huxely had to offer and so Children of Men was a movie I looked forward to with great eagerness.
What is the movie about? For the uninitiated, the movie narrates the story of world that is plunged into the throes of infertility. The steep decline in human population, the rise in depression, xenophobic governments, devastation and instability lend a dark and gloomy picture of the world in the year 2027. In the midst of all this, a woman is found pregnant and is soon expecting her child to be born. A miracle at these times. The story is about how she is taken over to a secret and almost mythical organization called ‘the Human Project’ that consists of scientists hoping to cure the world of its fertility related woes. The movie borders on the novel by P.D. James that goes by the same name.
I really liked the style in which the movie was made. Its very interesting that there aren’t any elaborate settings to create suspense or to keep you at the edge of your seat. For instance, when the protagonist, Clive Owen is escaping from the clutches of a terrorist organization, the car he steals refuses to budge. The thrill of watching this sequence lies in how slowly and painfully the car begins to move while he is being chased.
The moment of the birth of the child, to the moment at which everyone witnesses the baby in silence as it cries, some parts of the movie are absolutely surreal to watch.
And as much as I shower praise, the acting was pretty mediocre and there were some glitches in the way the sequence of events were framed, but otherwise it was a story, well told.
The future is a day away. How much does it take for a world to change?
