Bagdad Cafe

Bagdad Cafe

A heavyset German woman, tightly bound by her body and soul, sprays her hair into a rock hard permanence. Right there in the Mojave Desert she is having a fight with her husband. They are on some kind of miserable vacation which feels like hell touring America.

She can’t take it anymore. She takes her suitcase and stalks away from their Mercedes while he drives off into the red dusty sky and she walks to a sad truck stop and asks for a room.

An opening like that makes you stop and think about how cut and dried most Hollywood movies are, doesn’t it? There would seem to be no place for fat German ladies and homesick truck stops in today’s entertainment business but “Bagdad Cafe” liberates us from the assembly line of brain-dead high concepts in Hollywood and finds its own strange lovely way through. It is poetically just that this movie shot in English in America by a German has been one of the biggest European box office hits ever.

Jasmin (Marianne Sagebrecht) is shocked by what she finds at the Bagdad Cafe because it simply isn’t run on clean efficient German lines.

Brenda (CCH Pounder yes CCH Pounder), who shares space with her teenage children, a baby, an Italian cook who looks bewildered, a tattoo artist, and Jack Palance as a shipwrecked former Hollywood set painter who has definitely painted his last set.

And so Jasmin gets out her mop bucket and starts cleaning up her room while motel regulars look on agog. Back and forth she goes like some natural force propelled inexorably against dirt. Gradually it extends to other rooms in the motel; public areas; little lectures for Brenda about cleanliness; standards for public maintenance etc.

Day-by-day though little-by-little this easygoing desert atmosphere changes Jasmin herself. Her too tight hausfrau dresses give way before slack-billowing blouses. A strand of hair escapes from under glistening spray until at last down comes tumbling windswept freedom locks. And she demonstrates that magic tricks can be done by anyone!

Yes indeed: magic tricks! After whipping him into shape and getting some business going at the restaurant where they serve food cooked by love she begins doing close-up illusions for customers which slowly escalate until every night at Bagdad Cafe everybody involved runs cabaret show starring all motel residents including themselves as performers!

I guess all this sounds too nice so let me add that Percy Adlon directs with certain bleak undercurrent of despair crying babies unpaid bills young people outlasted only strings tied together holding them upright alone amidst vast emptiness surrounding them everywhere else around here except within reach around just behind eyes looking toward horizon beyond distant mountains where sun sets down below unseen world beyond sight range visible mankind thousands miles high above ground level sea level proximity air pressure altitude space time continuum infinity infinity infinity ages eons epochs cycles revolutions seasons equinoxes solstices moons phases eclipses all heavenly bodies solar systems galaxies clusters clusters superclusters strings filaments great walls voids dark energy entropy heat death universe finally collapsing back upon itself singularity birth rebirth creation recreation coalescence condensation agglomeration amalgamation precipitate precipitate precipitate dissolve dissolve dissolve!

He’s talking in this film about Europe and America, about the old and the new, about the edge of the desert as the edge of the American dream. I’m not quite sure what it is but that’s comforting; if a director could put these strange characters together and then know for sure why they were doing it in the same movie he’d be too cocky to find any humor in their situations. The charm of “Bagdad Cafe” is that every character is unpredicted and all moments are irrationally motivated which makes them all vibrate with life.

Watch Bagdad Cafe For Free On Gomovies.