Noticed at the Berlin Festival in February 2003, this film has become the cinematographic banner of a nostalgia for the former East Germany (the GDR) which for a time turned into a social phenomenon. It is also and above all a well-crafted comedy.
Consider an ordinary family in East Berlin, made up of a mother all the more devoted to the socialist ideal because her husband left her for the sulphurous charms of capitalism, as well as two grown teenagers, Alex and Ariane, who stamping with impatience in this sclerotic society. Set in 1989, history will soon come to their rescue by bringing down the Berlin Wall on November 9. Everything would therefore be fine if the mother, victim of a heart attack a few days before this decisive event, did not wake up eight months later from a deep coma, the slightest emotional shock being therefore formally discouraged by doctors. Unable to confess to their mother, under pain of finishing her, the historical upheaval that has just taken place, her two sons take the side of acting as if nothing had happened.
Ingenuity of the script
Contrary to a society that opens up to freedom and moves towards its unification, they will therefore strive to go back, making their mother believe that the GDR still exists. A laborious exercise, at the same time as an infinite comic source.
The treasures of ingenuity deployed – identical restoration of the apartment, return to East German fashion, meticulous transfer of new canned goods into containers of brands that have since disappeared, disguising neighborhood kids as socialist pioneers… – reach a peak with the installation of a television secretly connected to a video recorder supplied with fake news programs made in the GDR. The signs of change are immediately transformed into so many testimonies of the triumph of socialism. The crowds crossing the Berlin Wall in the direction of the West thus become imperialist refugees coming to find asylum in the East.
In addition to the obviously parodic dimension, the reflection here focuses on the ambiguity of the images, both faithful traces of reality and material for constant traffic, of which communist propaganda has made a badge specialty. Served by no good actors and by the ingenuity of its screenplay, this disillusioned farce poses, in philosophical matters, the question of knowing whether it is better to live on the mad hope of one day obtaining the order of a Trabant or to satisfy without put off his desire to drive a Mercedes. The answer to this despairing question counts less than the fact that it is asked by a director from a reunified Germany where the future never ceases to be disillusioned.