Mother's Soviet block

The year is 1989. The place is East Berlin, in the German Democratic Republic. Christiane's son, Alex, does not share his mother's devotion to Soviet communism.

When he is arrested during a demonstration, she witnesses the event and collapses from a heart attack. Comatose for eight months, she awakens in a new world. The Berlin Wall has fallen; East and West have become one. The old regime has been jettisoned for Gorbachev's new era of westernised democracy.

But Christiane's delicate condition means any untoward excitement could prove fatal. Alex (Daniel Br¸hl) concocts a plan to prevent his mother (Katrin Sass) from suffering the shock of the new by recreating the GDR in her apartment.

With the reluctant help of his sister, his best friend and his girlfriend, Lara, who is a nurse, Alex creates an illusion that he can barely sustain. Within the confines of their home, Spreewald pickles and Trabant cars are still dominant and IKEA, Coca-Cola and Burger King have yet to invade the East.

A one-joke movie with a long punch line, Wolfgang Becker's political satire is refreshing, funny and surprisingly moving, even if it ultimately outstays its welcome. Its real success lies behind the satire in the human comedy, where the peripheral observations and sardonic comments sneak in from left field.

"Look at the crap we used to wear," scoffs Ariane, Alex's sister, when he makes her dress in her old East German clothes before entering Christiane's bedroom, where she is confined; moments later, she puts on the polyester uniform of a Burger King cashier for her new McJob.

Alex digs out East German jars from the dump, washes them and refills them with pickles. And when he and Lara find an abandoned flat they can live in rentfree, he is delighted to find the cupboard full of East German products that will help him keep up the charade.

The humour is, however, threaded with pathos and compassion; the movie's subject is really a son's love for his mother and the lengths to which he will go to keep her alive. The relationship between Christiane and her children and the secret she harbours about their missing father is beautifully conducted.

Best of all are the fake news reports created by Alex and his video director pal, Denis, in which they pretend that westerners are seeking asylum in the East to escape from the clutches of capitalism in a desperate bid to explain away the growing evidence of the West on the streets of East Berlin. Book-ended by football - Germany won the World Cup in 1990 - and the space race, the film reaches a poignant, surprising conclusion that steers clear of sentimentality while retaining its liberal values.

Becker's vision is essentially benign, which blunts the edge of the satire; the blows he delivers to both communism and capitalism are feather-light. The real motor of the movie is its compassion for the dilemmas, farcical or otherwise, faced by the characters. When Ariane tells her brother that she has seen their father at the burger joint, Alex asks what she said to him: "Enjoy your meal and thank you for choosing Burger King," she replies, with distracted pathos.