Berlin Hero (2025) Der Held vom Bahnhof Friedrichstasse
IMDb meta-data is 1h and 52 m, rated 6.3 by 389 cinematizens.
Genre: Satire.
DNA: Deutschland.
Verdict: All too true.
Tagline: Believe it or not!
Bear runs a bankrupt video store in Berlin of 2020. It is more like a derelict museum than a business. When a cheque-book journalist in search of a story offers him Euros to tell his tale, he obliges for the geld. Since there was no story to tell he makes one up to jack up the price. He is surprised when that works, but Euros are Euros.
Once the lie is out there, it takes on a life of its own, and then it takes over his life. It cannot be un-lied for now he has something to lose – money and respect.
He may have been unhappy in his squalid store before the journalist disturbed the cobwebs, but now he is miserable, living and lying up to the expectations his story has ignited. The Euros are important but it isn’t just them. The respect, the civility, the admiration that the lie has brought him, starting with own adult daughter, are heady and addictive.
The fact that it is all lies does not phase the journalist at all who is eager to keep riding the wave as long as it lasts, and later when it does crash, he switches to another without missing a beat. He is an accomplished lie surfer.
Some comments on the IMDb suggest it is unrealistic. Oh hum. Watch Fox News for five minutes. Lies are swallowed whole everyday.
I enjoyed seeing some Berlin sites, though most of filming was done in Leipzig, including the Friedrichstasse station which when I went through it in 1994 still bore the marks of East Germany with a kind of internal Berlin Wall. I also noticed the chain link fence with the posters of the Wall martyrs on it. When I examined it in 1994 the last one to be killed in the Death Zone was a 25-year-old student two weeks before the Wall fell. Several hundred were killed in the Death Strip. Regrettably most of my photographs from that visit got lost somewhere along the way.
The Bear is played beautifully on this emotional roller coaster.
But the best line is dipped in acid when the retired, reptilian, repugnant, and rapacious Stasi officer says, ‘The mother of fools is always pregnant.’ It is from an Italian proverb: ‘La mamma dei cretini è sempre incinta.’ Ergo in German: ‘Die Mutter der Idioten ist immer schwanger.’ Words to live by these days.
The director died before the final shoot and the editing, and it was finished by another with some re-shooting to patch it up. That may explain why the reconciliation in the lavatory seemed too quick and easy. Time to get it done and out the door.
We saw it as part of the German Film Festival.