In one of the last roles in his career and even in his life, the legendary Swiss actor Bruno Ganz (who is best remembered by most as Hitler from “Der Untergang”, but even before that this great actor had a number of excellent roles) is an already completely vaporized East German striker, a hard communist celebrating his 90th birthday. The time and place of the action is the fall of 1989 and East Berlin just before the fall of the wall, and Ganz’s Wilhelm Powileit was apparently once a big face, one of the first German communists, who was probably dating Rosa Luxemburg. When the Nazis were in power, he and his wife Charlotte were in exile in Mexico for a while, and when the GDR was formed, he became an important factor.
He has been retired for a long time and it is obvious that the mean old man has completely exhausted himself, but he still inspires a certain awe in everyone. The whole family, friends and neighbors, as well as state bureaucrats, those classic communist functionaries, went to his East Berlin home for a reception to give him some kind of recognition. A whole army of people have flocked to Wilhelm’s house, but missing is his grandson, Sascha (Alexander Fehling), who defected to Germany a day or two earlier, and he did so even though his grandfather despises defectors most of all and wants nothing to do with those whose family members fled to the west. Only his father, the historian Kurt (Sylvester Groth), who survived the Gulag and found his wife Irina in Russia, with whom he is still in an unhappy marriage, knows what happened to Sascha.
Of course, the old man should not be told what really happened to his grandson, and the obvious intention of director Matti Geschonneck was to show, on a symbolic level, the disintegration and complete disintegration of a state and a political system through a disintegrating family. Geschonneck (born in 1952) is a native of Potsdam, which is in the east of Germany, and he probably knows very well what the situation looked like in the late eighties, when the stench of the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc was felt in the air and when it was a matter of days when the Soviet Bloc would collapse on its own. . The film, originally called “In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts”, was an interesting reflection on how this realization could affect those who did not want to renounce their political affiliations and who remained ardent communists until the end.
Perhaps it is best to look at this film as a bitter tragicomedy, a humorous drama in which there is not much reason to laugh. Although it was a fictional story, it all seems realistic, believable, finely thought-out and well-rounded, a smart exploration of what a change in the system might have looked like for a family like this. The idea was really to my taste, political, with interesting characters and good actors, but the problem is that it turned out to be somehow too boring, and too little witty and cynical for my taste.