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Just check the delight in his eyes when Alex happens upon an old pickle jar that was once his mother’s favourite brand; now he can fill it with fresh gherkins and nobody will be any the wiser.There is a tragicomic echo of this preoccupation with brand-name food when Alex’s sister, Ariane (Maria Simon), who has taken a job flipping burgers, sees their father at the drive-through “What did you say to him?” Alex asks, agog with curiosity. Even a new car has to be explained away: “We were only on the waiting list for three years,” says Christiane, amazed at their good fortune.”It’s creepy what you’re doing to your mother,” Alex’s girlfriend Lara (Chulpan Khamatova) tells him, but what she fails to understand is that Alex couldn’t stop this counterfeiting of reality even if he wanted to. To celebrate his still-bedbound mother’s birthday, Alex not only gathers old Party friends into her room; he also arranges for two local scamps to dress up as communist juniors and sing patriotic songs. Gradually the deception gathers momentum: when his mother asks for a television in the room, Alex realises the game will be up if she watches the news, so with the help of his friend Denis (Florian Lukas) he compiles video tapes of bogus news items that pity the West and their degenerate capitalist ways. Becker and his co-writer Bernd Lichtenberg see the farce in Alex’s frantic rearrangements – in a few sequences the film is speeded up – but they also find something touching in his efforts to get the details right.

In fact, don’t mention the wall.So Alex immediately sets about concealing the realities of reunified Germany, redecorating his mother’s bedroom in the unluxurious style of yesteryear and forcing family and neighbours to wear the drab duds they sported before “Westernisation”. On the streets, car horns toot in honour of Germany’s World Cup victory in 1990, but inside this particular apartment the time has been frozen. One evening Christiane happens to witness Alex’s arrest during a street demonstration; she collapses from a heart attack and falls into a coma. Eight months later she awakens from it, though the doctors warn Alex that any sudden shock may be fatal to her fragile system.

Her finding out, for instance, that communism has been routed would not be such a good idea. Alex (Daniel Br? lives in communist East Berlin with his sister and mother, Christiane (Katrin Sass), a committed Party member ever since her husband escaped to the West, abandoning her and the children. In Wolfgang Becker’s charming, melancholic Good Bye Lenin! a son lies to his mother to save her from dying, and so elaborate is the deception that it gradually takes over his life. Most comedies of dissemblance involve characters disguising themselves to escape detection – think of To Be Or Not To Be or Some Like It Hot. It is generally agreed that the only time you should lie is to save someone from being hurt. Le Corbeau – one of the great feelbad films of all time.’Le Corbeau’ is showing daily at the National Film Theatre until 7 August (020-7928 3232).

As an allegory of its time, it reveals interesting parallels with Camus’s novel La Peste (in English, The Plague, written during the Occupation and published in 1947): each has a doctor as the central character, and each features a suicide and a sermon in which the townsfolk are told that they have brought misfortune upon themselves. Interestingly, one of the earlier titles that Clouzot and Chavance considered for their film was Maladie Contagieuse (“Contagious Disease”). The Communist Resistance denounced it as Nazi-inspired anti-French propaganda, and the influential critic Georges Sadoul spread the rumour that it had been distributed in Germany under the title “A Small French Town” This was untrue, but widely believed. It was immediately banned in Vichy, however, where the Catholic Film Centre awarded it “5″, the worst possible rating, and the Office Familial de Documentation Artistique went one better, grading it “6″ (“5″ already meant “not suitable for any audience”, so “6″ was considerably worse). The collaborationist press in Occupied Paris gave it some good reviews, presumably seeing it as a portrait of a country that needed to be purified by the Nazi jackboot. Germain is pursued by a bedridden woman (Ginette Leclerc), denounced in the letters as a nymphomaniac, and a patient in the hospital commits suicide after “Le Corbeau” has told him that he is suffering from cancer. St Robin is anytown, anytime, with a picturesque church, noisy school and quiet streets.