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

-
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...
Post a Comment

Àma Gloria review – amazing performances in sensitive drama about a kid and her nanny

-

Six year old Louise Mauroy-Panzani is wonderful as Cléo, strongly bonded to her carer Gloria, who has to leave her

By rights Louise Mauroy-Panzani should be at the front of the queue for every acting award going for her role in this gorgeous French drama. Just six years old at the time of filming (the casting director spotted her in Paris arguing with her brother in the street), she gives a performance so open and natural, it has an almost transparent quality. You feel what her character Cléo feels as her world is turned upside down over one summer. Equally brilliant is another first-time actor, Ilça Moreno Zego, a real-life nanny playing Gloria, who has taken care of Cléo since she was tiny and is now moving back to Cape Verde.

The opening scenes showing us Cléo’s life with Gloria are beautifully detailed. Cléo’s mum died when she was a baby, and she lives with her dad (Arnaud Rebotini), who is gentle but remote, still reeling from grief. It’s Gloria who is the sun in Cleo’s life. Running out of school her little face, poking out from under a tangled mop of curls, lights up at the sight of her nanny. Then, one day, Gloria gets a call. Her mother in Cape Verde has died; she is going home to look after her own children.

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/kEY5OtS
via IFTTT

Comments

Post a Comment