Like the early works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Rudolf Thome’s films owe a significant debt to the French New Wave, particularly Jean-Luc Godard’s penchant for irreverent genre deconstruction. In that vein, Thome’s Red Sun is an exercise in keeping things “medium cool,” holding both its erratic narrative and characters’ motivations at a Brechtian distance. The violence, when it comes, is perfunctory and decidedly nondramatic, paving the way for The American Friend, Wim Wenders’s abstract and stylized adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game.
After drifting into Munich, Thomas (Marquard Bohm) heads straight for the Take Five nightclub, where he renews his relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Peggy (Uschi Obermaier). Little does this rambling man realize that, by crashing at her pad, he’s stumbled into a truly bizarre living arrangement. Peggy and her three roommates—statuesque Christine (Diana Körner), redheaded Sylvie (Sylvia Kekulé), and sprightly Isolde (Gaby Go)—have agreed on a pact whereby each woman must eliminate her male partner after no more than five days.
Thome and screenwriter Max Zihlmann immediately undercut any thought of building suspense by clueing viewers in on what the roommates are doing while Thomas remains asleep and blissfully unaware. They have given over one of the rooms in their warren-like apartment as an ad hoc killing floor, where Peggy summarily executes Howard (Don Wahl)—a businessman who Thomas happened to bump into the night before at the Take Five—after Isolde cannot bring herself to do it. When it’s not in use for assassination or other insurrectionary behavior, the girls keep the door securely locked, suggesting a sort of reverse Bluebeard situation.
The coldblooded nonchalance of Howard’s murder is rendered almost comical when, in the very next scene, Peggy brings Thomas an elaborate breakfast in bed. He soon settles in with all the aplomb of Belmondo in Jean Seberg’s apartment in Godard’s Breathless. In fact, Bohm’s Thomas closely resembles the illegitimate love child of Belmondo and Bogart, a roguish ne’er-do-well with his own rumpled charm. Throughout the film, Peggy constantly pampers and coddles Thomas, and we’re never quite sure whether it’s meant to lull him into a false sense of security, intended as a sly satire of “normal” bourgie relationships, or both.
Visually, Red Sun owes as much to the pixilated pop art of Roy Lichtenstein as it does the vibrant hues of Godard’s Pierrot le Fou. The large flat planes of the apartment walls are each painted their own primary colors, so that the characters often appear isolated against a monochromatic uniformity resembling the background of a comic strip. But because the characters circulate through the rooms seemingly at random, the aesthetic effect tends toward a psychedelic whirl. This is even turned into a plot point. When Thomas asks one of the girls which room is hers, she admits that they frequently switch rooms on a whim.
Thome shoots Red Sun like a documentary, which keeps viewers at an even further remove from its already disarticulated narrative. There’s always the semblance of a gap between Bohm and his character, as though we’re watching rehearsals for a fiction film. The general vibe is akin to the behind-the-scenes portions of a Jacques Rivette film, like the seemingly endless body contortions that open the French auteur’s 1971 opus Out 1. What we’re left with isn’t so much an actor fully embodying a character as it is the sight of Bohm playing around with a role. And Thome’s use of nonprofessional actors only adds to this alienating effect.
Given that this is a film written and directed by men, Red Sun’s feminist agenda is noteworthy: Thome has admitted in interviews to the influence of Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto on Red Sun, and, as a high-profile member of Berlin’s Kommune 1, Obermaier brings along her own media-savvy brand of radical chic. As for the radical part of that term: At almost the same moment that the roommates are blowing up a cowshed, the members of the Red Army Faktion (a.k.a. the Baader-Meinhof gang) were beginning their decade-long reign of political terror, which would become the subject of Fassbinder’s mordant The Third Generation in 1979.
Does Red Sun embrace the violence it depicts, or is it being satirized? That remains an open question. Ultimately, the film builds to a tense yet oddly idyllic conclusion on the banks of Lake Starnberg. Gun in hand, Peggy and Thomas chase each other through the nearby woods, in what amounts to a sardonic riff on the comparatively upbeat finale of Elio Petri’s double-barreled mindbender The 10th Victim. Whichever side of this particular battle of the sexes you happen to fall in line with, you can rest assured of one thing: that destruction will be mutual.
Image/Sound
The folks at Radiance Films present Red Sun in a new 2K scan of the original camera negative. The transfer is consistently bright and colorful, with the primary hues of the girls’ rooms and the bright green of the forest finale standing out vibrantly. Flesh tones look realistic, grain is very well resolved, and black levels are deep and uncrushed. There’s a fair amount of depth on display here, while fine details of costume and décor really stand out. The sole audio option is a German LPCM two-channel mono track that’s perfectly clean and clear, and suitably delivers the film’s eclectic soundtrack, which blends the mournful classical tones of Jean Sibelius with the trippy sounds of late-’60s psych bands like the Nice and the Small Faces.
Extras
The select-scene commentary track included on this Red Sun disc is by director Rudolf Thome and Rainer Langhans, a radical commune member who was Uschi Obermaier’s boyfriend at time. They cover a wide range of subjects including setting up the film, its continuing appeal for younger viewers, its sociopolitical backdrop, and Thome’s preference for working with nonprofessional actors. A nice complement to the track is the informative visual essay “Between Pop Sensibility and Social Critique” by scholar Johannes von Moltke, who touches on, among other things, the film’s influences (Pop Art, comic strips, Godard) and impact.
Elsewhere, the documentary “From Oberhausen to the Fall of the Wall” by academic and programmer Margaret Deriaz provides an in-depth look at the rise and fall of the New German Cinema. It opens with an overview of postwar German cinema, then examines the influence of the Oberhausen manifesto of 1962 on experimental filmmakers like Alexander Kluge and the husband-and-wife team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, before moving on to the rise of art house favorites like Rainer Maria Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders. Along the way, Deriaz highlights important contributions from gay and women filmmakers. On a final note, she suggests Wenders’s Wings of Desire as a fitting eulogy for the movement. Also included in the case is a thick fifty-page booklet with an essay by Samm Deighan, letters from Wim Wenders, and an archival interview with Rudolf Thome.
Overall
Hard to track down for several decades, Red Sun remains a fascinating, if calculatedly elusive, conversation piece that cannily captures a particularly fraught place and time.
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