Rote Sonne

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.

A dropout playboy waster Marquard Bohm reunites in Munich with a friend he knew in Hamburg Uschi Obermaier ; but she is now a member of a sort of Feminist Red Army Faction type outfit

But at first he does not cotton on it seems

This is a very moody piece imbued with the times when the Left in Germany grew teeth as they realized that marches and speeches and asking nicely for a more egalitarian world was getting them nowhere; add to that the rise of steely feminism (think Valerie Solanas S. C. U. M. kinda vibe); all this need be understood to grasp the mood and direction and the minds of the protagonists and intent of the director in Red Sun ....

The four women are all exceedingly beautiful Mara temptresses; the words femme fatale are the ones they would need to enter on their collective CV

Marquard Bohm has the face and demeanour of a degenerate; I have recently seen 2 other films with him from that time and this can be also said there; and he does it really well; acted or not 🙂🙃😉

The final scenes are really poignant and probably say something deep about the Masculine and the Feminine .... or not :...

If you are a fan of 60/70s Gegenkultur definitely drop in ...

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.

There's a long, stringent thread in German art movie tradition: the much-heralded "social relevance" almost always serves as an excuse for brainless ennui. Rudolf Thome's Rote Sonne, enthusiastically hailed in 1970 by Wim Wenders as the future of the so-called Autorenfilm, makes no difference. Slurring slacker Marquard Bohm moves like a grubby sleepwalker through the spartanly furnished rooms of a flat in Munich his girlfriend (astoundingly bland: Uschi Obermaier, anyway good enough for Jimi Hendrix when he was totally doped in 1968) shares with three other gals out to pick a bloody bone with dudes. Unfortunately the hausfrauen fatales never take action; instead, you get witless blather without end, certainly no story – we're in a German movie here, already forgotten? –, zero erotic ambiance, the monotonous repetition of Albinoni's Adagio in C minor, and the zombie-esque performances of the participants that Wenders tried to sell with the following: "The actors are just boldly present in the scenes, talking and acting as if they do not know what's next ..." Well observed, Wim! The shootout at Lake Starnberg – noticeably an homage to Vidor's Duel in the Sun – might be the most amateurish piece of crap Jesús Franco never dared to put in front of a lens, but an even bigger letdown are the 4.99 Deutsche Mark H&M synthetic skirts of the overwhelmingly unsexy chicks. Before you object: The Swedish clothing retailer was founded in 1947.