Rote Sonne

The film is okay, not outstanding. It helps that Uschi Obermaier plays the female lead and that the strange (conspiratorial) plot has some period color that I like.

To avoid any kind of spoilers, I can only tell you about the cars in this film ... they are beautiful and waterproof ... the nightclubs ... they are even better than the cars.

Only the girls' apartment, I have some problems with that. This strange building is a bit shabby like a mafioso's den. Not at all like one should imagine the accommodation of successful gals in the upcoming Olympic city.

If you are looking for other (maybe more realistic) German feminist-expressionistic cinema, I rather recommend "Strohfeuer" aka "A Free Woman" by Volker Schlöndorff.

The dialogues are ridiculous but not in a funny way, the story is absolutely unbelievable and the actors are lousy. I watched the whole film once but not another time for sure

We start in a car, the dialogue seems odd with Marquard Bohm getting a ride and maybe the writer has been on drugs. But almost from the beginning Bohm has a problem of slurring and appears drunk all the time. I have to say that although it is odd when he gets out the car, into the club and later at his girlfriend's flat, Peggy and her four other friends look wonderful, in very short skirts. We also see that there is a gun, which is rather odd here. I thought that Jean-Luc Godard also had a similar situation and he has said that if he wanted to make a film all he needed to have was a girl and a gun. In this one there are some more guns and five girls and people get shot, it appears. The film was shot in 1969 and it was a strange time and there are some really strange films but this is one of the oddest. It is really absurd and rather lovely, with the rooms in different colours, a well shot film and the few outside locations look great, oh and have I mentioned that the girls are great, especially Uschi Obermaier and there is an explosion.

This movie is very funny indeed. Maybe it's an attempt at film noir with feministic background that has gone terribly wrong. Maybe the comic elements have been intended. Maybe it's a political statement with nods to Godard. The plot depicts a group of young woman that decide to kill their boyfriends if they insist on a relationship lasting longer than five days. Actually it's pretty entertaining, although all characters are talking and acting in a VERY weird way, resulting in some german reference books calling it a science fiction-movie set in the future, although there are no hints in the plot that justify such an assumption. Anyway, the guy who wrote the dialogue MUST have been on drugs: "If the condition to change society is a change of the weather, then we have to change the weather. This is not impossible." You get the idea, although this may have been a very bad translation.

This is a dated movie that you have to take in its historical context. A bunch of free-wheeling hippie girls share a flat, a carefree attitude to sex, and a shocking disregard for the physical integrity of their big-spending boyfriends, whom they have communally decided to off after a few days of TLC. This attitude of breaking with conventions, political ideology, availability and excessive violence describes the Zeitgeist of the late 1960ies and early 1970ies very accurately.

The balance is offset when an old boyfriend arrives on the scene. As he describes himself bluntly: "I've got this washed-out charme that's irresistible". He is a memorable and unique character, a freeloader, strangely hideous like a Mick Jagger stand-in and immature, and still captivating. When gang leader Peggy (played surprisingly well by the iconic Uschi Obermaier, who was actually more of a "media personality" than an actress) hesitates to comply with the group's five-day-rule she offsets the carefully balanced group dynamics. The movie finishes with a memorable showdown on beautiful lake Starnberg: "Are you hit?" -- "Just in the lung. No biggie." ("Du, nur'n kleiner Lungendurchschuss.")

The movie could have been better if there had been a few, homeopathically dosed scenes of ultragraphic violence. And as much as I liked the Thomas character (the movie is worth seeing for him alone), actor Marquard Bohm slurs his lines really badly.

But those are minor grievances, Rote Sonne is a bold, outstanding dystopic movie.