Solo Sunny review – a rueful East German gem of ambition, loneliness and faded dreams | Film

The terrible sadness, tattiness and poisoned idealism of the old GDR is preserved as if in a time capsule in this East German film from 1980; it could be a kind of B-side to Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. The heroine, would-be solo pop singer Sunny, is told by her ungallant MC that she is no Liza Minnelli; Cabaret fans might well incidentally recognise here the brusque German word “bumsen”.

Solo Sunny is the work of Konrad “Koni” Wolf, a director with an impressive and strange pedigree: he was a garlanded state-sanctioned artist in East Germany, much admired at the Berlin film festival, whose older brother Markus happened to be one of the highest-ranking officials in the Stasi. It makes Wolf the second most politically compromised German film-maker in history. (The disillusioned communist East German character in Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Kairos is a big fan of Wolf.)

Ingrid “Sunny” Sommer, played by Renate Krößner, is a former factory worker who tours the GDR with a hideously cheesy kind of gang show that plays clubs and community centres, headed by a tired, sub-jazz-funk band called the Tornadoes; she is one of the guest singers and they also have a kind of acrobat turn and a ghastly MC-slash-comedian. Sexy Sunny falls for Ralph (Alexander Lang), their stand-in sax player who is also a brooding intellectual; Ralph composes the English lyrics for a kind of James Bond theme-type torch song that Sunny has written for herself. Their brief relationship emboldens Sunny to try for a solo career, to break free from all these grotesque losers, the terrible band composed of slobbish guys with bad comb-overs who keep hitting on her.

In striving for a glamorous solo career, is Sunny rejecting the collectivist ideals of the GDR in favour of the specious glamour of the capitalist west? The question is never asked explicitly, but – perhaps without really intending it – Wolf allows us to see the poignant ambition in every frame. “Do you think a non-celebrity can have personality?” Sunny asks sadly at one stage. “It’s worth aspiring to …” replies one band member. There is something very melancholy in the shots of the gaunt tenements, uncool denims and boxy Trabants on the gritty streets of Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg.