Compare and contrast Goodbye Lenin (Wolfgang Becker, 2003) and La Essay

Compare and contrast Goodbye Lenin (Wolfgang Becker, 2003) and La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) in terms of their significance - Essay Example The struggles that those connected to her must endure can be seen as the struggles that occur whenever an ideology of a culture passes, the growing pains that must happen in order to come to a point where freedoms are fully understood and experienced. In La Haine (1995), the pain of having to deal with the nature of city inequities where race and poverty create a power inequality between authority and the poor is explored through the events of a day in the life of Parisian impoverished youths. In turmoil that is part of the perceived landscape of the European culture, as filtered through Hollywood visions of racial inequality, the nature of life after the fall of communism is reflected. In both films, social issue are examined through personifications of struggles as well as the reactions of those around those personified ideals are explored. The plot to the film Goodbye Lenin (2003) is defined by its connectivity between the present and the past. The first portion of the film connec ts the events that will happen further along within the film through a recalling of 1978 when Sigmund Jahn entered space. Jahn was from East Germany and this is a great source of pride for the main character of the film, Alex. The film becomes an exploration of the way that life is lived before the fall of the wall and how it has developed since that time. Alex’s mother, a supporter of the Socialist Party, sees her son arrested at a protest before the wall falls and has a heart attack which leads to a coma that lasts through the political events that precede and are post the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The nature of the exploration is defined by the way that Alex, his sister Ariane, and his girlfriend must prevent his mother from finding out about the political changes because the shock might cause her to once again fall into cardiac arrest. Through the ways that the three plot to present former oppressive atmospheres to Alex’s mother, Christiane, a revelation of the profound differences before the fall of the wall and since that time can be appreciated. In recreating the oppressed state of life before the wall fell, incidents such as taking out all the brighter decor that has Western influences and replaying old broadcasts of events that happened before the fall of the wall provide a contrast of the ways in which life was experienced on either side of the powerful and transformative event. The adherence to the old ideologies creates an additional sense of the transformation that has occurred during the time of Christiane’s coma. There is a running commentary about the beauty of anarchy, the fulfillment that is created when human beings deny ‘authority’ and assert their right to freedom. In the end, despite her own belief and feelings about conformity, Christiane is scattered after her cremation through the use of a rocket that belongs to Alex. This act is an illegal act, but he does it anyway, freeing his mother from her own constraint and scattering her in the place that she loved, while symbolically celebrating the freedom that they have gained through the fall of the wall and the transformation of their nation. The film, La Haine (1995), explores the tension between anarchy and authority, the police representing authority and having both honorable and corrupt representations available for contrast. The power dynamic is what sets the authority apart from the anarchist youth who explore their