a light in the sky
by Douglas Messerli
Percy
Aldon (writer and director) Bagdad Café /
1987
Despite
my description of this film as being a “Romanization” of the US West, Percy
Aldon’s comedy Bagdad Café begins in
a kind of hell, a sad world in which the German couple visiting the U.S. Mojave
desert play out the breakdown of their relationship before our eyes. The
husband (Hans Stadbauer) is obviously a slob, a selfish man who is drunk in the
middle of the desert. The wife, played brilliantly by Aldon’s earlier find,
Marianne Sägebrecht—a plump, corseted woman who could only be found in Germany’s
Bavaria—is frustrated by her husband’s boorish behavior, determining then and
there to leave him, pulling her oversized suitcase from the trunk, and trudging
ahead through the desert sands, as he goes spinning off down the highway.

What we soon realize is that the two
women, despite the vast outward differences between them, share a great deal of
psychological baggage. Brenda is about to send her ineffectual, child-like
husband off, whereafter she will be forced, as she has already been, to keep up
the café, care for her beloved but dangerous adventuresome daughter and her
piano-playing son’s baby. Although the café has few customers at the moment,
the night time truck drivers who stop for dinner, along with the café’s
long-term residents, the ex-Hollywood painter Rudi Cox (Jack Palance) and an
S&M inclined tattoo artist, Debbie (Christine Kaufmann). Just as Jasmin—who
quickly discovers that the suitcase she has pulled from the car trunk contains
not her clothes, but her husband’s—Brenda is on the verge of a breakdown, which
her husband, Sal (G. Smokey Campbell) recounts, as he watches her through
binoculars, for the audience. Even little things irritate her, the new guest’s
attention to her Bach-playing son, Salomo (the musically giften Darron Flagg),
and Jasmin’s gentle friendship with Brenda’s daughter, Phyllis (Monica Calhoun).
Finally, she explodes when she travels into town for a few hours for supplies,
and Jasmin becomes determined to present her with a wonderful gift by
completely cleaning up—and out—the mess of junk and paper that fills the
chaotic gas-station office. Furious with the utter transformation, she demands
that this German Hercules return all of her “shit” to this “Augean Stables.”
The impossibility and ridiculousness of the task forces her to rethink her
command as, with the compliments of passing customers and visitors, she
suddenly is proud for the changes made in her life.
Gradually, the two women begin to bond, Jasmin helping to serve dinners and, eventually performing magic tricks she has learned from the magic kit purchased by her husband she has found in his suitcase. Their sleight-of-hand robberies of their customer’s pockets and even hair-dos, along with their song-laced shows, accompanied by Salomo, bring the truckers in by the dozens; for the first time in her life Brenda’s café begins to make money and bring her fame. The buxomly Jasmin, meanwhile catches the eye of Rudi, who insists that he must “paint her,” gradually stripping away her corsets and crude attire to reveal her fecund flesh. The arrival of a handsome young man, Eric (Alain S. Craig), who posting his tent on their property, draws the attentions of Phyllis all help to transform the isolated hellhole where the film begin into a lively outpost, a world so full of life that the negative-spirited Debby decides to decamp, insisting that the place has “too much harmony.”
Aldon’s film turns from a depiction of a
dry desert spot to a world of glorious sunsets, stunning neon displays and
strange displays of light in the sky, some of these captured by the painter
earlier in his stay (something similar to what had greeted the Aldon’s, as I
mention above, when they first visited this spot, long before the making of the
film). Relying on his friend, film designer Bernt Capra, Aldon gets the sense
of this lonely yet lovely world exactly right.

Unfortunately, when Jasmin does finally
return and the two women ceremonially hug in slow motion (one of the weakest
moments of the film) in what is clearly now a fully developed commitment to
sharing life, the movie, which has made nearly all its statements, turns highly
sentimental, replaying the festive performances from earlier on, with even the
local truckers (Gary Lee Davis and Ray Young) singing and dancing. On a
particularly windy morning, Rudi knocks on Jasmin’s door as, within, she
pretends to redress for modesty, before appearing in the nightgown in which she
was first dressed. Entering her room, Rudi proposes marriage to the Bavarian
woman, who insists that she will “talk it over” with Brenda, which we recognize
will end in a marriage that will make certain that Jasmin will never be forced
to leave again. We may not be overwhelmed by the melodramatic series of tropes
played out in these last scenes, but we cannot dismiss the interlinking wail of
Calliope’s performance of Bob Telson’s song, “Calling You,” a song so primal
that the relationship between the characters of this film ultimately does seem
pre-determined if not predestined.
If Bagdad
Café is highly unbelievable, it is a highly satisfying romance, a genre
played out in the movie’s entertainments of being robbed only to have all the
possessions returned again.
Los Angeles, May
9, 2014
Reprinted
from International Cinema Review (May
2014).
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