There is a genre of films that fall into the category of "crazy bitch" chronicles. I have recently seen a French picture of this description, Let the Sunshine In directed by Claire Denis. Solo Sunny (1979) is worthy example of this kind of film, albeit with a German inflection. An early example of this sort of movies, and, perhaps, the grandmother of modern films in this genre is Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. Films of this species follow closely the adventures and misadventures of a heroine who has, sadly, something seriously wrong with her. Generally, the female protagonist is beautiful, intelligent, and ambitious, but she has awful taste in men, invariably selects abusive partners, and ends up lonely, delusional, and solitary. In some cases, the heroine's sorrows can be attributed to the patriarchy; however, more likely than not, there's an obstinate strain of mental illness at work in "crazy bitch" pictures. Movies of this sort, often, begin in comedy and end in tears. The genre deserves more consistent and coherent study, but I'm certain it exists and films belonging to this category share certain characteristics.
Take Solo Sunny for example: in one scene, the heroine, Sunny, confronts her boyfriend Ralph about his unfaithfulness. Ralph is a hunky "philosopher" of sorts. Sunny comes to his tiny, dim-lit apartment (it's walled with old books) and gets into his narrow and uncomfortable bed with him. (The people in Solo Sunny make love in cramped, uncomfortable beds or on the crack between two single beds that have been pushed together.) In the morning, Ralph is awake and has an alarmed look on his face. He wakes Sunny by speaking to her: "Why is there a knife in this bed between us?" Sunny is cheerfully unconcerned: "I put it there." "But why?" Ralph asks. "Because I was going to kill you," the crazy ex-girlfriend says. "Why didn't you?" Ralph responds. "Because I fell asleep," Sunny says. "So if you hadn't fallen asleep, I would be dead?" "That's right," Sunny responds. Ralph plucks the knife out of the sheets and carries it to the kitchen, It's a foot-long butcher knife with a gleaming blade. This is a paradigm for the "crazy bitch" genre.
Sunny is an orphan, now about 30 years old, who sings in a band called "The Tornados". The Tornados are like the airport Holiday Inn band from Hell. They are scarcely proficient and play soft rock and toothless funk to audiences comprised mainly of geezers. (The Tornados actually tour a circuit of geriatric homes as part of their endless road trip through cheerless East German towns.) The film was made in the waning days of the DDR (Communist East Germany) and the band seems to be state-subsidized, part of an attempt to entertain the dour and miserable citizens of the Worker's Utopia. There's a smarmy emcee who looks like a character from an Indiana roadshow of Cabaret and a couple of variety acts that share the stage with the Tornados, a male and female couple of acrobats, and several dancers. Sunny is the show's chanteuse. Sexual harassment isn't a "thing" thought to be unseemly in the old DDR and Sunny's fellow performers mercilessly grope and proposition her. She's attractive in a waif-like manner, slender and blonde, a German version of one of the "birds" in Swingin' London who looks a bit like a meatier Twiggy. She seems to have randomly slept with some of the band members but this isn't clear -- in any event, there is some sort of pheromone that she exudes that causes the sulky and profoundly unattractive men around her to constantly harass her. (East Germans were not a pretty people -- the men all wear leisure suits and tight jeans and have dowdy little moustaches like American porn stars of the seventies. The women are generally drab and dress like hookers or charwomen.) Sunny has an earnest admirer, a taxi-cab driver who fancies himself a wealthy man and an entrepreneur in the German Worker's Republic. He seems like a reasonable guy but he also has an ugly little moustache and a receding chin and bulbous face -- the sort of doughy features that most people in the movie display. The man is slavishly loyal to Sunny but she won't give him the time of day.
Sunny lives four days of the week in a hideous apartment with a toilet one-and-a-half stories below her quarters. Her neighbors are censorious and, this being East Germany, everyone is constantly informing on everyone else. The complaints aren't political -- the movie isn't bold or honest enough to depict informants ratting each other out to the STASI -- but rather that Sunny "entertains" men in her rooms, insults fellow tenants, tolerates messy pigeons on her window sill, and other matters of that sort. (In one funny scene we see a harried boy-cop confronting Sunny about these complaints in an office with a picture of a growling bulldog of a commissar on the wall. He doesn't know how to respond, but, obviously would like to make a date with her. Sunny says she will make a counter-complaint about the old people in her apartment building, but doesn't have any paper -- she has to ask the cop for a sheet of paper on which to write her complaint.) At her apartment while climbing the purgatorial stairs up to her apartment that opens in Berlin style into a nasty-looking central courtyard, Sunny gets revenge by treading on the fingers of the chief complainant, an old hag, who is cleaning the stairs on her hands and knees. Sunny tours with the show on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. The tours are horrible: senior citizen centers, tiny union halls, county fairs and there are no decent lodgings for the company. In one scene, Sunny is staying with a couple of the female performers in what appears to be a dormitory of some sort of asylum -- the beds are stark contraptions made of pipes. One of her male bandmates won't take "no" for an answer and tries to rape her. Sunny beats the guy over a head with a metal object, maybe a clothes iron or something. The other women shout at them to be quiet so that they can sleep. Later, Sunny is insulted by the emcee before appearing at a fair and she takes umbrage walking off the stage. The guy who tried to rape her has found a new, dumpy girlfriend who he promotes into Sunny's role as the singer for the band. Fired without notice, Sunny takes the train to either Berlin or Leipzig (I wasn't able to figure out the movie's geography) where she has a boyfriend, Ralph, a "philosopher" and sax player. Ralph doesn't expect Sunny and is entertaining another naked girl in his grim, tiny apartment. Sunny is enraged and she dumps out the window the bottle of cheap government-issue whiskey that she bought for the man. The naked girl doesn't much care about covering her nudity but doesn't want to leave the bottle and tries to retrieve it. Ralph cries out "You're crazy!" to Sunny. Sunny loves Ralph and has spent many nights with him and, in fact, offered to bear his children -- a proposition that seems to terrify Ralph. Ralph is a "certified Philospher" which means he has an "Ausweis" (I think this means "diploma"in this context.) Ralph is the only character who seems even remotely socialist or communist -- he writes opinion pieces for a newspaper and says that many workers had to sacrifice for him to achieve his education which doesn't seem to be helping out the workers much at all. Ralph has written an English-language pop song for Sunny which is actually pretty good. (The song in variations is played repeatedly on the soundtrack and it's catchy.) Sunny performs the song at a solo gig at a Berlin cabaret. While she sings people eat, drink, carouse, and basically ignore her. Sunny, then, abandons the music business and goes back to some kind of task that she previously performed at a local factory. But she quits the job and, then, attempts suicide with sleeping pills. She survives. In the final scene, Sunny traipses into some abandoned tenement buildings in Kreuzberg where a band is squatting. The band is rehearsing in the snowy courtyard. Sunny confronts them, announces that she will sleep with anyone she wants, and offers to sing with the band. If anything, they are even worse than the Tornados. The camera tracks upward into the gloomy sky and we see the dingy buildings of East Berlin.
I liked this movie a lot. The heroine is spunky, half-crazed, and appealing. The miserable landscapes of East Germany are a fascinating spectacle. Everyone looks downtrodden and unhappy. The movie was made during the last decade of the oppressive Communist regime in East Germany and seems refreshingly apolitical. In fact, if anything the film probably makes life in the DDR look worse than it was. The drinks are all watered and the food looks awful -- at one point, Sunny gnaws on a "Wurst" as if it were as hard as a dog bone. The film is consistently inventive visually; the editing is disjunctive and elliptical and the camera work is extremely expressive. The movie's somewhat aimless plot and its depressing elements are more than offset by the picture's striking camerawork. The movie has been recently restored by the German government and it looks great. The film was directed by Konrad Wolf, one of the DDR's most important filmmakers and he is, indeed, an auteur with an eye for striking images and a good touch with actors. Solo Sunny was the last big box office hit made by the State Studios in Babelsburg and it was also extremely popular with audiences in West Germany as well -- the picture made money and was a prestige export for the failing Communist regime. East German movies are hard to see in this country, but, it seems, that MUBI has a tranche of them and will be showing them in the next couple months.
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