Sonnenallee I recently returned from Berlin and, in the wake of the city and its history, decided to watch German-made films about a divided Germany and the Berlin Wall. It is not surprising that there are so many of these films – society continues to analyze its past, learn to accept it, look at it from different points of view. “The Life of Others” and “Good Buy, Lenin!” I once watched, but “Sunny Alley” did not. I decided to catch up.
Sun Alley was filmed in 1999 by Leander Haussman, exactly 10 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Sunny Alley is a Tragifarce. Real situations are made to be absurd, but it is this mixture of nonsense and truthfulness that makes the viewer laugh bitterly. And besides, is it not contrary to common sense that the very existence of a wall in a whole living organism - a big city - with a single public transport system, sewers, telephone lines? Thus, the farce is already laid in a real historical situation.
I must say, in the film from the authors “got” both East Germans and Western. If the former simply live in a system that mocks them, the latter are arrogant and cowardly – once you remember their mockery of the wall (which in reality, of course, could not be).
However, “Sunny Alley” is not just a comedy of positions on the topic of the GDR / Germany, it is also a kind of anthem of youth and love, because when we are young and in love, we do not care about any walls, and there are no barriers to our happiness – that is the main idea of the film.
7 out of 10