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Rating: This film focuses on the theme of the trauma of awakening from a long sleep, in a world that is no longer the one you knew, seen through the eyes of a son, just over twenty, who has to take care of his mother who has awakened from a deep coma.
East Berlin, late '70s. Christiane is abandoned by her husband who flees to the West, and is left alone to raise the two children, Alex (the protagonist) and Ariane. After a period of depression, the woman decides to throw herself heart and soul into social engagement, for the construction of a perfect socialist Germany. The years go by and we reach 1989, when the woman witnesses the violent repression by the police of a demonstration asking for more freedom of expression within the Democratic Republic. Among the crowd, Christiane also spots her son Alex, beaten and dragged away by the officers. The shock gives her a heart attack, and she subsequently falls into a deep coma. The woman remains in a coma for eight months; a period that is relatively short, were it not that during those months the Berlin Wall has fallen, Germany has reunified, and her beloved DDR no longer exists. Upon her awakening, the doctors tell the children that the woman's heart remains very weak and that any trauma could prove fatal.
Knowing that his mother would be bedridden for a long time, Alex decides to bring her home to try to prevent her from noticing the profound changes that were affecting Germany in those months. Thus begins a feverish effort to try to reconstruct a socialist microcosm in his mother's room: from food to clothes to newspapers, Alex turns the whole city upside down in an attempt to find all the elements of a world that had lived for forty years but had taken only a few days to end up in the trash bins. When his mother asks to watch some television, poor Alex will be forced to work, along with a friend aspiring to be a director, on creating actual newscasts modeled after those that aired before the fall of the Wall.
These exhausting efforts will lead him to clash multiple times with both his sister and his girlfriend Lara (whom he met at the hospital where his mother was admitted), but on the other hand, they allow him to build a microscopic version of that perfect socialism in which people like his mother deeply believed but never managed to realize.
In the film's finale, the family will have to face a new surprising truth about the father's escape.
A cross between a dramatic film and a comedy, where strong themes are dealt with in a light and nonchalant manner. Not a masterpiece, but still a beautiful film well-directed and acted, and one of the greatest successes in German cinema ever.
Year: 2003
Duration: 121'
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