Wolfgang Becker makes a funny, affecting family comedy from a son’s attempt to hide political upheaval from his mother. Daniel Brühl and Katrin Sass keep it believable, though the story stretches further than the premise comfortably allows.
Wolfgang Becker starts with a son’s wish to protect his mother and gives him an entire country to maintain. East Germany is disappearing, but Alex intends to keep it going for her benefit, including its television news. The premise makes a good comedy, and Becker finds enough love and worry beneath it to make the family matter as much as the deception. We recommend it for those performances, with some patience required when the elaborate pretence begins to repeat itself.
Daniel Brühl makes Alex’s devotion persuasive without asking us to approve of everything he does. There is something troubling in a son deciding how much of the world his mother can be allowed to know, and his performance leaves that question open. Katrin Sass gives the mother enough dignity that we never feel invited to laugh at a foolish woman who has failed to keep up. Their scenes give the political jokes a consequence: each successful deception lets this unequal arrangement continue.
The fabricated news reports are the funniest part, borrowing the authority of official television for a household deception. We laughed, then felt unexpectedly fond of Alex for going to such trouble to spare his mother distress. The imitation of state broadcasting is sufficiently convincing to make the dishonesty uncomfortable as well as amusing. Becker gives these reports enough attention to make them enjoyable even before we consider the effort of producing them for one person.
Martin Kukula’s cinematography favours drab colour and lighting, which sometimes makes the comedy look less lively than it feels. It is a defensible choice for a story about attachment to an ordinary, familiar world, though the images need not be quite so dull to make that point. Lothar Holler’s production design does more to explain the appeal of Alex’s task: the recreated East Germany feels like somewhere people have lived. The period detail helps us understand why losing familiar surroundings might hurt, even when the political change is welcome.
Yann Tiersen’s score makes the tenderness explicit, sometimes more insistently than the performances require. Brühl and Sass have already done enough to make us care, and the musical prompting can feel unnecessary. Peter R. Adam’s editing allows the complications to accumulate for too long, rather than keeping the central deception brisk. At 121 minutes, the film needs a firmer cut; its explanatory voice-over also tells us things the acting has made clear.
Becker and his fellow screenwriters are better at small human observations than at finding fresh uses for the premise. Yet the film earns its place among political comedies by keeping ordinary attachments in view. It can acknowledge what was wrong with the old state without treating everybody who misses something about it as a fool. That generosity matters when the story considers the disappointments brought by Western change, giving the satire something to address beyond the absurdities of the old regime.
Becker takes seriously the discomfort of seeing familiar ways of living disappear. There is no need to share the mother’s loyalties to recognise that discomfort, and the comedy never requires us to dismiss it. Choose it for the family story, and allow for a stretch in which Alex has more stamina for his scheme than we do.
