User Reviews

La Boum it isn't at all, even though the female lead looks a lot like young Sophie Marceau, it has a level of teenage romance, and of course the song, "Reality".

But I thought this is most of all a strong example of "Ostalgie" (nostalgia for the GDR, East Germany, 1949-90). Bewilderingly so.

The "little message" not very deep below the surface seems to me to be: The un-luxurious GDR was such a good place that in 1985, a West German teenage tennis crack, after living there for some weeks under mistaken local identity, ultimately prefers to go back to "Kleinruppin" (locations filmed in Wittenberge) and his girl Jana, instead of Miami FL where he had won a scholarship at a sports academy.

For a 1988 DEFA movie this would have been an interesting, yet expectable plot. But made in 2004 United Germany? I felt vaguely reminded of the 1961 DEFA spy thriller "For eyes only", showing the loving care of the Stasi, and East-West and back migration, with somehow similar "realism".

I must admit that I feel some Ostalgie myself, even if I've only experienced the GDR on day trips from West Berlin, and rail transit. But the functions of police, Stasi, army, border patrols, Bautzen jail are all briefly touched here, and lightly dismissed again. The most severe penalty seems to have been cleaning the toilets floor...

For those who think "GDR wasn't so bad after all" and sometimes dream it still exists, this movie may make perfect sense. But reality, grim as it sometimes is both before and after reunification, tells a different story.

Still, I rate this 8/10, for delivering lovely details of 1985 GDR, much food for thought, of a parallel universe where the idea of a weekend trip to Venice would be "just kidding"...