As Invasões Bárbaras e Adeus, Lênin! A (des)construção do sonho no cinema atual

Abstract

This article proposes a reflection on two motion pictures recently launched in DVD, The Barbarian Invasions, by Denys Arcand, and Goodbye, Lenin!, by Wolfgang Becker, exhibited previously in Brazilian movie theaters and that, in different manners, have as subject the changes experimented with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the hegemonic raise of globalized capitalism. Both films still have in common protagonists dealing with seriously ill parents, and the passage from one stage to another in recent history marked metaphorically by the presence of two generations. The author observes the pertinence of this topic in contemporaneous culture and the relative lack of cinematographic works on this subject. Although they remind basic issues of the moment we live, the time of reception is slow and requires the elaboration of complex cognitive processes which happen in their own rhythm, that ignore fluxes acceleration in post-industrial capitalism which seem to reconfigure the rhythms of existence in this late modernity. For the author, the analyzed motion pictures confirm that affection and culture are antidotes to nihilism and apathy.