Rote Sonne

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.

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

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.

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.