Our reviewers select and review the best independent and foreign films on amazon.com, cd universe, and netflix

Goodbye, Lenin! (Germany 2003 121 min, dir: Wolfgang Becker, cast: Daniel Bruhl, Katrin Sass, Chulpan Khamatova)

This version of the American Rip Van Winkle legend is set in Germany. What if you went to asleep in East Berlin just before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, and woke up to a new world order? What if you were kept from seeing things had changed so completely because the shock might kill you? Alex’s mother wakes from a six month long coma after a heart she suffered just before the Wall crumbled.

The doctor warns him not to do anything that could upset her fragile recovery. He interprets this as his dictum to keep things exactly the same as before the Wall went down. So he recreates East German life in her apartment just as it was a year before. But life and history move on, and there comes the inevitable moment when she ventures out in her slippers to see what has become of her cherished country and countrymen (the scene in the clip).

In Germany this film unleashed a wave of “ostolgy,” the German-English term for nostalgia for the old East Germany (someone has even started manufacturing Spreewald pickles again). Goodbye Lenin! could easily have been a crass, one-line comedy. It’s not that at all.

The deeper story is of Alex finally learning the truth about his father (who fled to the West when he was a toddler), and understanding how to free himself from the confining world he has created around himself and his mother.

Who is the real Rip Van Winkle asleep in Good bye Lenin!? Alex has been dreaming all his life and now must shake himself awake and find a life in the wider world beyond the apartment, and beyond the Wall that once protected him as well as isolated him. Washington Irving’s short story is about a man who falls asleep just before the American Revolution and wakes up twenty years later, still proclaiming his loyalty to King George. What we take as a children’s tale is not that at all, but a serious look at change and denial. History rushes past us every instant of our lives. Those of us who choose to sleepwalker can never feel the breeze.

The Edge of Heaven (Germany 2007) The Edge of Heaven (Germany 2007, 116 min, dir: Fatih Akin. cast: Baki Davrak, Nurgul Yesilcay, Hanna Schygulla).

Germans and Turks have built a symbiotic culture with Turks like American Whites have with American Blacks. With us, slavery was the original sin. With them, it is BMW. In the boom years of the German auto industry there were not enough Germans to build all the cars. So they imported “guest” workers from Turkey with the idea they would fill out the production lines until enough German kinder were born to take their place. The birth rate didn’t go up and the Turks didn’t leave.

Today in major German cities, it is as easy to buy a shwarma as a schnitzel. The cultures clash over religion, neighborhoods, police brutality and jobs. Fatih Akin is part of this clash. His parents emigrated from Turkey to Hamburg, Germany, in the 1960s. The era he grew up in saw upheavals both in German politics and German-Turkish relations. Much of this is captured in The Edge of Heaven, but the politics are of the Turkish-Kurdish radical left and its spill over into Germany society.

What makes The Edge of Heaven so wonderful is Akin has sewn all this cultural and political clamor into a drama about loss and redemption that seals together Germans and Turks in a singular quest for love. A mother grieves for her murdered daughter and redeems that loss by embracing the young woman implicated in her death. A gay young man tries to atone for his father’s accidental killing of a woman prostitute and ends up questing to understand him. All this to the beat of Kazim Koyuncu’s music (check him out on iTunes).

Great movies start with great writing. It’s rare that a writer-director can create a story that treads on the edge of melodrama but never crosses the line. This used to be the definition of great American movies; but no more. Now we look beyond our borders for the films that once defined us. Films that now help define other peoples and other struggles. The mission of MovieWithMe.com is to find them all.