Truly Dreadful Film

the audience applauded

As Good As It Gets

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Percy Adlon's cult-hit "Bagdad Café" sets the tone the strangest way. Marianne Sägebrecht Jasmin, a Bavarian tourist, stuck in the middle of the Californian desert with an abrasive husband, she mutters names like Disneyland and Las Vegas but what we get from their body language is that a/ they're lost, b/ they're not exactly in their element and c/ she's at the verge of breaking down.And bingo, Jasmin finally snaps, she takes her luggage and walks away from the car. I like it when a movie features exactly the amount of exposition needed, who needs backstory when you see an overweight frau in typical German clothes walking eagerly across the Mojave Desert, and even refusing a ride, you know there's more than traveling.Meanwhile, in a remote and shabby transport café, with an adjacent hotel, an infuriated Brenda, played by CCH Pounder, keeps raging at her husband for having forgotten the percolator while being in town. No need to backstory again, the husband is fed up with his woman's tantrums and leaves her alone. She's the boss of the Bagdad Café now, and it's a matter of time before the coming of a strange visitor.And as different as they were, Jasmin and Brenda were at crucial times of their lives, seemingly dead-end that could be turned into crossroads. To use a hackneyed term, some people are just meant to meet each other. Speaking of that, when I was a kid, "Bagdad Café" has always been an enigma, I hadn't seen the film, but I knew about its most defining image of the two women embracing with that 'Calling You' song in the background. And this image was stuck in my mind for years and years before I finally saw it. Cinema is all about imagery and music and I guess the film offers both without trying too much and it's genuinely good. Now, there's no particular reason for this gem to stand higher than the others, but no reason for the opposite either. Maybe it's because the film has the most unlikely setting, protagonists, and 'story' as far as the story-line goes, that at the end, it's impossible to compare it to any other movie, it's something that could have belonged to the 'New Hollywood' period, one of these 'slice of life' movies, like "The Last Picture Show" without the depressing 'end-of-an- era' theme. Only what could have been a rather bleak and depressing material is handled with good heart and sweetness, Jasmin incarnates a certain openness to new cultures or environments, typical of European mindset, and she manages to change the people around her, meeting more hostility than defensive resistance from the hot-tempered and bossy Brenda. But there's never a moment when you feel that the dynamics are forced, Jasmin marks her territory in the smoothest way, as if our sympathy wasn't taken for granted. But who can resist for that generous woman and that actress who, in any other typical Hollywood (or mainstream commercial European) film, would only be given foil roles.As Jasmin, she wins our hearts as the poor German stranger, estranged from everyone who discovers a shabby, sleazy, untidy place, but still better than the one she left. She knows she must put that in order, but she starts well, by putting her own house (i.e. room) in order. Her atypical behavior catches the attention of the motel- occupants, Brenda's son, a gifted pianist and her daughter who's delighted to see the monotony of the motel being broken for once, truck drivers, a tattoo-artist and a set- painter played by Jack Palance. His presence, his old-hippie fashion the fascinated look he constantly directs toward Jasmin, is one of these details that make "Bagdad Café" such a special movie.Today, there would have been some sexual undertones, the film would have been a comedy, a robbery would happen, or a subplot involving the daughter being a drug- addict or raped, anything for cheap thrills, because no director would believe it possible to maintain such plot absence for a while. And the most dramatic thing is that he would be right, because our ambitions in film-making became so high that we don't realize, they're reversely low. That the film was a box-office hit in Europe and a cult- classic in France shows that the 80's also belong to a time where miracles were possible, where it was still possible to reach the hearts of people with simple stories. And maybe 'simple' stories are the most difficult to make, because there's nothing to hook our mind on, we just have to witness human relationships going on, and trying to find how some scenes speak to us. And maybe it's the film's very particular setting, in the middle of nowhere, that allows it to speak universal statements to everyone. This is a true 'alien' in both meaning of the world, as a foreigner and as a person alienated from her own world, but at the end, she's the one who proves that every occupant of the hotel was alienated by boredom, routine and the stress of their bossy owner, something that was progressively destroying their lives, until the place is resurrected and Jasmin, herself, both singer and magician becomes a sort of money-bringing attraction.And I guess, this is the meaning of that defining image, of that magnificent moment where the two women embrace, you know what they say about images speaking thousand words. This image, one of the most iconic from the 80's, show two women who had more things in common than they thought, two women who met at the most difficult time of their life, show a friendship that finally blossomed over distrust and misunderstanding, and two persons that could finally take a new more optimistic path for their life. It's a mutual "Thank You" behind these friendly smiles. Thank you for putting my house in order, literally for one, symbolically for the other.

I discovered Bagdad Cafe by accident. The film I'd set out to see was sold out so, having schlepped into London, I reluctantly settled for something I'd never heard of showing on another screen. It was Bagdad Cafe. Subsequently I bought the VHS, lent it to someone - "You MUST see this movie!" - and never got it back. I bought the DVD, lent it to someone else, same result. I bought a second DVD and I am NEVER lending it out. Never ever.This is a spellbinding film, and like many of the reviewers here I can't quite work out what the spell is. It's a simple story: a German tourist finds herself dumped in the Nevada desert by her obnoxious husband and makes her way to an isolated, rundown motel and service station - the eponymous Bagdad Cafe. She makes friends with the people there. That's it. The isolation of the motel reflects the isolation of the motley collection of characters living there. Life seems to have passed them by just as the trucks on the highway pass them by. They are in the middle of nowhere, going nowhere, cast up on the edge of the flow like human flotsam. Each is lost in solitude and quiet desperation, stuck, trying to make the best of things. Jasmin, Marianne Sagebrecht's character, is also stranded by the abrupt and brutal break-up of her marriage. In a black irony she has grabbed not her own suitcase but her husband's, which contains his clothes and, surreally, a teach-yourself-magic kit. With a vulnerable, valiant and soul-wrenching dignity Jasmin sets about making the most of her bleak situation, a stranger in a very strange land. She rolls up her sleeves and cleans the place. She makes proper coffee, strong. Alone in her room, she starts teaching herself magic tricks from the kit as mile-long trains trundle by in the night.One by one, the other characters begin to thaw around her. Jasmin is the catalyst that brings them together. Artist and former Hollywood set-painter Rudi Cox (Jack Palance, in lizard-skin cowboy boots as reptilian as his eyes) falls helplessly in lust, then love, with this voluptuous Teuton who has appeared out of the desert like a perspiring valkyrie. The café owner Brenda (CCH Pounder, a world of helpless pain in her face) slowly lets go of the rage that is tearing her apart. She learns to smile again. Brenda's grown-up children, the Bach-worshipping son and the wayward daughter, are won over. The once-deserted café starts to attract a clientèle. Why? "It's magic," as Jasmin says, blue eyes glinting, prestidigitating eggs, coins and ribbons from the ears of laughing customers. Magic indeed. The film weaves an indefinable spell under skies cascading with colour, against a soundtrack that includes Bob Telson's Oscar-nominated 'Calling You'. Love, friendship and fellowship bloom in the desert. Hope blossoms in the sand. Director Percy Adlon (the screenplay was written by his wife Eleonore) has created a gentle, haunting, humanist jewel. And no, you can't borrow my copy.

Very interesting. Here is a film that takes place before cell phones and computers. In fact, at the front desk of this cafe they have a rotary phone.Still with me? Bagdad Cafe is out in the desert. No downtown, no Starbucks, no shopping malls. But, it's a place where people have landed and have to make due with what they have. Ever heard of the phrase if you get stuck with lemons make lemonade? Well, these people do just that.This film is about people stuck with something that might seem dismal at first but taking the bull by the horns and making something out of it. The film shows a small group of people who are depressed and bitter but then becoming alive and happy. All it takes is some imagination. Not an expensive computer or I-phone.The acting is excellent, the sets are wonderful, the characters perfect. It may be bittersweet at times, it may seem a bit low key but it all ends well.

In a world where (some) men just escape and hide, and women go ahead and start everything anew, any place becomes a good place to give new lymph to one's life: change lies in everyone's will to make it happen, and history teaches that women are far better than men in this. The director (a man!) of "Out of Rosenheim" (better known as "Bagdad Cafè") proves this simple truth very clearly and honestly. In my still in progress search for on the road movies I bumped into this curious piece of cinema, not a road picture properly, since no physical journey happens, but certainly more than an inner journey develops. It involves the lives of some odd characters, especially Jasmin and Brenda whose lives, so distant but so similar, come to meet at the Bagdad Café, located on a "desert road from Vegas to nowhere" (quotation from the wonderful leading song "Calling you"). At the beginning it is a shabby, dirty, anonymous place, where people only pass by, run by a hysterical and melancholic Brenda, whose encounter with the impeccable "deutsche" Jasmin will turn the cafè into an amusing and happy place and will renew both lives radically. They will become friends, besides suspicion and fear, by teaching mutually how to enjoy life again. And it will turn out very difficult, almost impossible, to leave this magic place. The cast is outstanding, the two female protagonists are perfect in their parts, but also Jack Palance, with his mixture of past glory and present melancholy, leaves the mark.The very good photography (some settings captured at sunset are really effective), together with the deeply involving and enigmatic music contribute to a significant emotional impact on the viewer, and also some very funny moments are to be enjoyed. A truly worth seeing picture.