G. Q. MAGAZINE, May 1988

Fringe Dwellers of the Cinema

By Kenneth Turan

Percy Adlon doesn’t look like Hollywood’s idea of a film director..... Talking with him is a playful, complicit adventure that can lead anywhere. Adlon may begin by discussing his presence at a major David Hockney opening…

I am not a person for such gatherings; I am more interested in hiking, much more,

then go to his thoughts on idle chatter in general...

I hate these cross-conversations. What is best is no talk -- that will be my film someday, a film without talk that is not a silent picture...

Clearly, and to his credit Adlon is not going to get very far in a story conference with studio panjandrums... Adlon spent nearly a decade making more than forty documentaries for German TV.

I only wanted real people, real landscapes, with the crew speaking softly and hidden, like hunters in green, not like those loud film people with their red scarves.

Eventually, feeling limited by having to be guided by reality, Adlon turned to features, though they, too, were initially on literary subjects. His delightful CELESTE (1981), which delineated the relationship between Marcel Proust and his housekeeper, Celeste Albaret, scored a major success in Britain (David Hockney turned out to be a fan) and introduced him, albeit gingerly, to American audiences.

Working with his wife and co-scenarist, Eleonore, Adlon describes the gestation process for his projects as…

our greenhouse. We talk about many, many possibilities of telling stories. We watch and water them in our minds. Then one grows and grows, and we have to get it out of the greenhouse before we expect to.

Adlon’s biggest American success, a major triumph at the 1985 New York film festival, was SUGARBABY, starring the extremely non-svelte Marianne Sägebrecht as an over-weight mortuary attendant who spies a slim, drop-dead-handsome, quite-married subway conductor and determinedly goes about trying -- despite al the obstacles, obvious and otherwise -- to seduce him.

This film began with two images of Marianne at two different parties,

Adlon explains.

I saw her at one party lying all night long in a swimming pool, doing the dead woman’s float for hours. Then I saw her dancing rock and roll beautifully, wearing high heels, and very, very alive. Those two images were like symbols of life and death.

BAGDAD CAFE (the ad line Adlon would like to use is “the menu is different”) came into being in a similarly serendipitous way. He and his wife were driving through Barstow, California, when they saw in the sky a dazzling pattern of rays emanating, it turned out, from a solar energy plant.

This was so impressive, I just wanted to invent a story for these rays,

Adlon says.

I wanted to take Marianne and Whoopi Goldberg, whose THE COLOR PURPLE had opened in New York at the same time as SUGARBABY, put them under those rays, let them meet and discover that life is not what they were doing until then.

Adlon, not surprisingly, was never able to break through the iron curtain of double-talk that surrounds cinema celebrities, and he doubts that Goldberg ever even got to hear about the project.

Those managers and those agents,

he says, with feeling,

I hate them.

Without Goldberg, the script took a different turn, and the finished project stars veteran actress CCH Pounder as the curmudgeonly Brenda, sole spark plug of the down-and-out Bagdad motel-and-cafe complex (named after a spot Adlon found on the map, buy which no longer exists) that is slowly decaying into the Mojave Desert, from which it sprang.

As if Brenda doesn’t have enough troubles -- what with a chronically incompetent husband who leaves her, a daughter who considers flirting to be her life’s work and a son who’s addicted to Bach -- into her little world comes Jasmin (Sägebrecht), a (what else but) portly German tourist also abandoned by her husband. Brenda’s desert mélange is eccentric enough to include both Debby (Christine Kaufman, late of TOWN WITHOUT PITTY, and TARAS BULBA), a melancholy tattoo artist who considers Death in Venice to be light reading, and Rudi Cox (the venerable Jack Palance), a former Hollywood set painter who now specializes in canvases featuring those Barstow rays. But even in this hot-house a foreign bloom like Jasmin stands out from the crowd.

The story of BAGDAD CAFE is the story of how Jasmin and Brenda come to be boon companions. There is not enough conventional plot here to cover one of Sylvester Stallone’s deltoids, but the film manages, against what at times seem like formidable odds, not only to cohere but also to fascinate and entertain. Partly this is due to Adlon, who carefully and meticulously scripted what could be the ultimate off-the-wall production and who is such a master of his own particularly quirky and whimsical tone. Partly it’s due to the marvelous Marianne Sägebrecht.

Asked to describe his star, Adlon is temporarily at a loss.

She looks very soft and she isn’t. She looks very fat and she isn’t. She looks very beautiful and she isn’t. There are very few faces that it’s worth making a film about them, and this is one.

With a presence all her own, Sägebrecht, as those who’ve seen SUGARBABY can testify, has the ability to make the impossible seem not merely possibly but inevitable. An actress incapable of making a false move, she turns a series of poses for Rudi Cox into a hysterical montage and turns BAGDAD CAFE into a delicate experience to savor, when other, more obvious and conventional films merge into obsolescence.

THE TIMES (London), October 6, 1988

Bagdad Cafe

By David Robinson

Not many European films shot in America in English language turn out well. Win Wenders’s Paris, Texas was a rare exception; now it is joined by his fellow countryman Percy Adlon’s wonderfully endearing BAGDAD CAFE. Featuring the heavy-weight Marianne Sägebrecht, who starred in a previous off-beat charmer by Adlon, SUGARBABY, the film is a fable, and has the fable’s quality of putting truth before likelihood. Fräulein Sägebrecht plays Jasmin, a solemn Bavarian hausfrau unaccountably touring the California desert with her boorish husband. They quarrel and part. The husband takes the car but leaves her the coffee machine, and beneath the baking sun, Jasmin, in her tweed suit and feathered Bavarian hunting hat, staggers into Bagdad, Cal., a township consisting of little more than a rusting motel, unsuitably named Brenda’s Palace. Brenda herself is an irascible black lady, whose husband has fled, leaving her with a feckless daughter, a musician son, and an odd assortment of residents.

So acute is Brenda’s xenophobe suspicion that she reports the new guest to the Sheriff. Jasmin, with melancholy patience, sits out all the hostility, and the fury aroused by her efforts to introduce Teutonic order into Brenda’s mess. Bit by bit patience wins out; Jasmin makes friends with everyone, even Brenda.

A shade slow at the start, once it gathers momentum it draws the viewer into its style of fantasy (Jasmin and Brenda break into a musical number in the finale) and the charm of its theme: how people can conquer their instinctive fears and get to know one another.

Adlon has no inhibitions or problems in choosing and directing English-speaking actors. At the centre of a wonderfully eccentric ensemble are three outstanding performances. C. C. H. Pounder, as Brenda, is as spiky as her hair and elbows. A weather-worn Jack Palance plays an old Hollywood scene-painter who woos Jasmin with shy courtesy and portrait sittings. Marianne Sägebrecht herself has a charm as big as her girth: before our eyes the glum hausfrau blooms into a woman with a beauty of her own, displayed in full she discreetly and progressively sheds her garments for the benefit of Palance’s easel.

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