Solo Sunny

With the Golden Age of Hollywood slipping farther behind us each year, we might consider being a bit more flexible with our definition of what constitutes classic cinema. Many of the films of the 70s and 80s which were at the time considered iconoclastic and rule-breaking have developed over the past three decades a patina of respectability. This is certainly true of the work of West German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose films often referenced Hollywood classics even while deconstructing their elements in the soul-achingly banal environment of Fassbinder's tortured protagonists. On the other side of the Berlin wall, another German filmmaker labored in a similar spirit to address subjects that were close to the hearts of both East and West Germans but which remained, for reasons of politics or collective shame, unspoken. Konrad Wolf was the son of Friedrich Wolf, a physician turned playwright whose Communist politics got him booted out of Stuttgart by the Nazi Party in 1933. Relocated with his family to the Soviet Union, "Koni" grew up speaking Russian rather than German. After seeing action as a soldier of the Red Army during World War II, Konrad Wolf studied directing and filmmaking in Moscow with Sergei Gerasimov. The year following his father's death in 1953, Wolf returned to Germany, settling in Berlin, where he made his first film Einmal ist keinmal ("Once is never," 1955). Very quickly, Wolf established himself as one of East Germany's great writer-directors and his 1958 film Sterne ("Stars"), a coproduction between East Germany and Bulgaria, won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. Konrad Wolf completed 15 films before his untimely death from cancer in 1982, at the age of only 57. The most atypical of his projects was also his last. Solo Sunny (1980) is the story of an East Berlin singer (Renate Krößner, later in Werner Herzog's Invincible) who calls herself Sunny and sings with a traveling jazz band, the Tornadoes. Booked on an endless junket of dire gigs in drab provincial music halls, Sunny quarrels endlessly with her male bandmates even as she fends off their sexual advances. Rebuffing a friendly taxi driver (Dieter Montag) whose earnings could support the both of them, Sunny falls instead for Ralph (Alexander Lang), an aloof saxophonist and student of philosophy who lives alone in an apartment crammed with textbooks. Although Ralph writes her a signature song, he soon breaks Sunny's heart. Worse yet, she finds herself replaced as the lead singer of the Tornadoes, sending her back to a dreary day job and a lonely life in her tenement apartment. After overdosing on sleeping pills, Sunny makes one final attempt to put her life back together and to realize her goal of becoming a professional singer. The performance of Renate Krößner is the jewel in the crown of Sunny Solo. Homely-cute in the Samantha Morton mold, the actress can look (with her soulful eyes) alternatively seductive and (with her gloriously imperfect smile) downright juvenile, making Sunny one of cinema's great movie brats ("I'm blunt, sleep with whomever I like... I'm Sunny"). Supporting this award-winning performance is the supple, evocative direction of Konrad Wolf, who shares the credit with scenarist Wolfgang Kohlhaase (The Legend of Rita). While the concept of a third rate band hacking its way through the sticks could have been played for laughs (This is Spinal Tap, Still Crazy), Wolf and Kohlhaase keep the material specific, small and unflinchingly honest, resulting in a richly hued and rewarding film about the fragile yet resilient nature of dreams. One of the few Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft productions to hop the Berlin Wall and become a success throughout Europe, Solo Sunny nevertheless lapsed into obscurity in the years following Konrad Wolf's death. (The film was withdrawn from circulation in 1985 after Renate Krößner emigrated for political reasons to West Germany.) Plucked from the depths of the DEFA vaults by First Run Features (the home video arm of an independent distribution company founded in 1979, the year Solo Sunny was made), the film looks only passable on this Region 1 disc. (Although listed as being coded for Region 1, the disc will play in Regions 1-8.) Obvious PAL to NTSC conversion issues result in bothersome smearing when movement occurs onscreen. The letterboxed image otherwise boasts warm, lifelike fleshtones and chromatics that pop out from the washed out, industrial backgrounds (cinematographer Eberhard Geick had a background in documentary filmmaking), making the overall viewing experience less than ideal but certainly watchable and at times quite eye-catching. Another complaint: the English subtitles translating (sometimes maladroitly) the 2.0 German soundtrack are nonremoveable. The disc's only extra is a 21 minute featurette providing biographical data on Konrad Wolf and featuring a 2002 interview with Wolfgang Kohlhauser, who discusses the philosophy and legacy of his late friend and collaborator. For more information about Solo Sunny, visit First Run Features. To order Solo Sunny, go to TCM Shopping. by Richard Harland Smith