Film appreciation: Solo Sunny - a glimpse of '80s East Germany
Solo Sunny, a 1980 drama about a pop singer touring small-town East Germany, offers fascinating and invaluable insights on life in the communist republic.
The eponymous protagonist of Konrad Wolf and Wolfgang Kohlhaase's 1980 drama is a pop singer with a band called The Tornadoes who's frequently attired in blue jeans and a black leather jacket. Ingrid, who prefers to be called Sunny, is a young woman living alone in the big city who spends time accepting or reject sexual propositions from various men, including a saxophonist, a philosopher and a taxi driver. Sunny looks, and sometimes acts, like a character in a Hollywood movie.
If that was actually the case, the twenty-something free spirit's life — and this film about her — wouldn't be at all notable. After all, Sunny is just part of a travelling troupe of musicians and other performers, including acrobats and a tap dancer, who play in small town venues. Her personal life doesn't seem all that scandalous, especially when viewed in 2015.
But is not actually a West German version of '70s American youth films, as it hails from the communist East. So the insights this film provides into life in the not so democratic German Democratic Republic prove fascinating and invaluable.
was a one of the few East German films to be a smash hit outside its home country, and it also won some prestigious international awards, including the best actress Silver Bear (for Renate Krossner) at the 1980 Berlinale. It also turned out be the final film of Wolf, its primary director, who died two years after making this drama.
The son of a Communist Party member who moved with his family to Moscow after the Nazis took control in 1933, Konrad Wolf served in the Red Army before enrolling at the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography, where the instructors included Sergei Eisenstein. He subsequently embarked on a film career; as the younger brother of Stasi spymaster Markus Wolf, he would appear to have been a candidate to make propaganda films.
Yet the director was known and widely respected for making films with realistic and fair outlooks. In , Wolf openly shot scenes set in worn-out looking parts of East Germany, as well as colourless newer sections, and empathetically featured a number of characters whose outlooks were dark and stormy, rather than sunny.
Wolf's co-director, Kohlhaase, was also 's scriptwriter. Far more prolific and famed as a writer rather than filmmaker, his screenplay was inspired by Sanije Torka, a woman he had met a few years previously. A modestly talented singer, her wilful ways often put her at odds with the world around her.
Perhaps to protect her from an intolerant government, Torka was not given a mention in . But finally, in 2009, her part in bringing the classic film into being was revealed in Alexandra Czok's documentary, .
