Has Alex continues to live the life he produces become increasingly outrageous. The length which she goes to 2 create these lies for his mother are likewise outrageous. When her favorite pickles could not be found he dives into the dumpsters in their neighbourhood in search of an empty glass jar from her favorite pickle brand and filled it with the new pickles from Holland. But perhaps most interesting is that he uses legitimate footage of the Berlin Wall falling and the people rushing into the west but he uses this image to twist the truth with a new commentary. The commentary states that this footage is actually depicting people rushing away from the list in order to get rid of their materialistic lives and embraced the ideals of the East. While this is entertaining in the film itself, it is easy to see how even in modern times, today, we are told or shown what things to believe in the media and they are not necessarily the whole truth.
Most interesting leave though is that the deeper Alex in bed himself in this fictional world the more convinced his girlfriend and his sister become that he is doing the wrong thing. Alex of course is not the only member of his family who has started to blend the truth. In fact the mother revealed at the end of the film that for many years she was the one who abandoned the children’s father by refusing to go with him in the West. The children had been told that their father left either in search of another woman or simply turning his back on his children but in truth the mother refused to go with him and made her children stay in the East.
Family relationships are a key element in this particular where the family is made up of vastly different characters. And as the narrative move forward the relationships between all of these characters become increasingly strained the results of Alex attempting to protect his mother with his charade. He becomes increasingly controlling and the deception he started in order to protect his mother is taken to extremes which has an impact on what his sister does for a living, which diapers her baby can wear, and who was responsible for the invention of Coca Cola. Of course in spite of all these lies there exists a strong bond between the mother and her two children. Love is what allows them to forgive one another and it allows them to start a new beginning. Both Alex and his sister forgive their mother for her deception, naturally because of their own.
It becomes increasingly clear as the film continues that the mother initially suspect her children are lying and you’re the end of the film she figures it out. As he walks into her hospital room following her second stroke it becomes clear that Alex’s girlfriend has told her what was going on and in her final moments with her son she pretends to continue believing in his lies, and act which underlies the true strength of their family love.
In reality this font is one deeply seated in Alex’s childhood. The flashbacks to his youth show him desperate to make the world right for his mother and desperate to make his mother proud of him. He often dreamed of being the second man in space from East Germany and took part in the young rocket Builders Association. His childhood anxieties about pleasing his mother and making her proud continued well into adulthood as he continued to seek out his mother’s approval by creating the perfect world for her.