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

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Konrad Wolf’s 1980 drama follows a singer trying to escape the drab compromises of GDR life, capturing the melancholy of thwarted ambition with warmth and wit 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 Ka...
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Poor Things, Anyone But You, Wish: the biggest films coming to Australia on Boxing Day

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Misbehaving mallards, chiselled leading men and Disney in decline … here’s our guide to what’s about to hit a screen near you

In all my years as a loyal Boxing Day cinema-goer, this particular crop of films might be the strangest. Several films here feel beamed in from an alternate universe; others are decidedly creations of our own ghastly world. There are mawkish dramas, aeriform travelogues, and at least two entries which live and die on the power of their stars’ abs. In other words: fitting diversions. Enjoy!

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