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West Germany · 1987
Rated PG · 1h 35m
Director Percy Adlon
Starring Marianne Sägebrecht, CCH Pounder, Jack Palance, Christine Kaufmann
Genre Comedy, Drama
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While traveling across the Mojave Desert, a German woman, Jasmin, encounters a dilapidated motel/diner. When she meets Brenda, the eccentric owner, the two form an unlikely friendship which revives the locale and its community members.
Bagdad Cafe is a visually exhilarating and consciously modern film, more concerned with projecting an atmosphere or spirit than with telling a story. It's hard not to fall in love with this comic fable about the magic that develops at the meeting of two cultures.
Much of the film`s charm resides in the fact that there is no reason for any of this to happen, except for the director`s sheer will that it be so.
The New York Times by Janet Maslin
Bagdad Cafe is too slow-paced to work as a comedy, and its screenplay manages simultaneously to be both shapeless and pat.
Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas
Bagdad Cafe, which Adlon wrote with his wife, Eleonore, and Christopher Doherty, is a miracle of timing and control for all its aura of zany, off-the-cuff spontaneity. It is the work of a director who has such a clear idea of what he wants and where he's going that he can take his time to build up every joke for the maximum payoff.
Washington Post by Rita Kempley
With its foibles and quirks, it's something like a Sam Shepard play by way of the Black Forest.
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
The charm of Bagdad Cafe is that every character and every moment is unanticipated, obscurely motivated, of uncertain meaning and vibrating with life.
It's only a state of mind.
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