After having a fight with her husband in the middle of a nondescript/Californian American desert, a plump middle aged German lady lands at a motel, a road stop called Bagdad. The usuals of the place, led by a fiery lady landlord regard her with suspicion. The characterisation of the locals and the freshly arrived is caricatural and their differences arise some kind of comic conflict. As days go by, she becomes the agent of change for the place and brings perspective to everybody else. The arc describes the German lady from antagonist to solver (she does magic tricks in the cafe and this brings in clientele).
Bagdad Cafe is a hyped and popular film of the ‘90, in my guess due to its particular form. Brightly yellow-orange saturated, crazy-cut (jump cuts, repetitions), hints of a parallel reality to the one characters live in.
But the film fails to move my heart or my imagination. The quirkiness of the place fades away slowly as the film progresses and starts looking for a conflict to keep its show running (the German lady has no-working permit).
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