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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‘You have to get over the me thing’: Kevin Bacon on money, marriage – and learning to live with himself

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Kevin Bacon, Hollywood’s great survivor, first set hearts fluttering in the 1984 classic Footloose. Now 65, he’s back on the big screen again. Here, he talks about his band, politics, family, embracing change and, most of all, learning selflessness…

There’s a state that veteran Hollywood actors can reach, beyond ravenous ambition, but with retirement still distant, that seems to make them contented as professionals and mellow as people. Kevin Bacon, now 65, has hit that sweet spot. Continually employed for decades, he shares a Manhattan apartment as well as a Connecticut farm with his wife of 35 years, Kyra Sedgwick, and their two adult children, Travis and Sosie. Bacon is in a country band with his brother, Michael, and otherwise channels any musical overspill into adorable Instagram videos of the Family Bacon (barnyard animals included) covering pop songs old and new. The hunger of the 1980s lead-actor-in-waiting, the frustration of the bit-player in mid-career who kept a wary eye on his place in the order of things… these concerns have worn away, Bacon says, with time and with reflection.

“Obviously, I’m not in this to do worse than I did last year,” he tells me, leaning right back on a camel-coloured sofa in his apartment. “But as long as I feel like it’s a good part, an interesting part, something cool, I got no problem moving down a call-sheet.” At the outset of a career, he says, “you get on set and you start to see that it’s hierarchical. Who’s getting paid more? Who’s getting a bigger trailer? Who has the bigger part?” The tendency at first is to see the hierarchy and to try to climb. Bacon strived for a while. “And when I kind of rethought it, and rethought about the possibility of being number 10 on a call-sheet, or number two, or number 25, or whatever – that’s when I figured out who I was as an actor. So I no longer have a problem doing a small part. As you can clearly see.”

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