A year after the death of director Wolfgang Becker, his last work is coming to cinemas.
With “The Hero from Friedrichstrasse Station” Wolfgang Becker (1954-2024) says goodbye to the big screen – and at the same time to his audience. A year after his death, the film is released in German cinemas almost to the day on the first anniversary of his death.
It's a dignified and loving conclusion from a director whose “Good Bye, Lenin!” (2003) wrote a piece of film history and in his last work once again combined everything that made his cinema special: humor, melancholy and a keen sense of the absurdities of German culture of remembrance.
Scene from “The Hero from the Friedrichstrasse Railway Station”
From video store owner to national hero
The focus is on Micha Hartung (Charly Hübner, 53), the operator of a small video store in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg and on the verge of bankruptcy both professionally and privately. When a journalist portrays him as the alleged mastermind of a spectacular mass escape in 1984, his life is completely thrown out of control. The inconspicuous daydreamer becomes a pan-German hero, the half-truths become a structure of lies that can collapse at any moment.
Between press events, talk shows and an invitation to see the Federal President, Micha gets to know Paula (Christiane Paul, 51) – but she also believes in the impostor's lie despite herself.
Becker and screenwriter Constantin Lieb – based on the novel by Maxim Leo (55) – knit a bittersweet story about truth, deception and the longing for meaning from this absurdly comic starting point. As in his award-winning cinema success “Good Bye, Lenin!” Becker puts the big story next to the little lie – and turns it into a mirror for a country that is constantly retelling its past.
Scene from “The Hero from the Friedrichstrasse Railway Station”
Ensemble between humor and melancholy
The film thrives on the great ensemble that combines familiar faces from Becker's previous films with new artists. In addition to audience favorite Hübner, who can be seen here for the first time as a grandfather, and Paul, who was already seen in Becker's successful film “Life is a Construction Site” (1997), Daniel Brühl, Jürgen Vogel, Leonie Benesch and Leon Ullrich, among others, shine.
Figure skating legend Katarina Witt (60) has a charming guest appearance on a television talk show, and Becker herself – together with Lieb – can be seen briefly as an “observer”. Cameraman Bernd Fischer captures Berlin between the nostalgia and the present in warm, sometimes almost dreamlike images. Lorenz Dangel's music carries a hint of nostalgia without tipping over into sentimentality.
Scene from “The Hero from the Friedrichstrasse Railway Station”
Lie, memory, invention
“The Hero from Friedrichstraße Station” is a thoughtful comedy and a loving bow to its own cinematic cosmos. While Micha teeters between truth and drama, Becker shows how thin the ice of our interpretations has become. History, the film suggests, is not a solid foundation, but rather a continuous negotiation of narratives – between fact and fiction, heroism and imposture.
When the credits finally roll almost endlessly, it seems like a silent afterword from the director himself: a last, mild look at a country that sometimes finds heroes where they never actually existed.
4 out of 5 unreturned VHS tapes