OVP: Bagdad Cafe (1988)

Film: Bagdad Cafe (1988)
Stars: Marianne Sagebrecht, CCH Pounder, Jack Palance
Director: Percy Adlon
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"Calling You")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

The 1988 Academy Awards are an odd duck when it comes to the Best Original Song category, because the Oscars chose to inexplicably stick to only three nominees.  Looking through a few of my handier Oscar resources, I cannot find an actual reason as to why the Oscars went with three, as it certainly wasn't a lack of options.  You have not only Disney's "Why Should I Worry" from the Oliver & Company soundtrack (it would be another year before the music branch would have a ten-year crush on the Mouse House), as well as a major radio-friendly behemoth like "Kokomo" (Cocktail), which was from the Beach Boys & was literally a #1 hit with a major presence in the film (both of these tunes would be nominated for the Golden Globes).  Instead, the Oscars decided to skip both of these movies and instead honor a lilting ballad by a gospel singer from a movie that is almost completely forgotten today, Bagdad Cafe.

(Spoilers Ahead) Bagdad Cafe is an odd movie, I'm just going to start there before we get into the plot as the movie reads as conventional if you just go for a description.  Jasmin (Sagebrecht) is a German woman who has seemingly been abandoned by her husband on the side of the road in the middle of the California desert.  She comes across a rundown gas station/cafe/motel called the Bagdad Cafe, run by Brenda (Pounder), an irritable woman with two kids and a husband who has also just left her.  Brenda is suspicious of Jasmin, first about where she came from and then why she's so kind to her and her family, but eventually comes around on her, realizing that they have more in common than they don't.  The movie is populated with a series of odd characters who come to the Bagdad Cafe from their own humdrum world, including Rudi (Palance, whose career had a major rebound after this film which eventually resulted in him winning an Oscar four years later for City Slickers), a former Hollywood set decorator who becomes obsessed with painting (and wooing) Jasmin.  The film ends with everyone being friends, and Jasmin working for Brenda & potentially marrying Rudi.

Like I said, that sounds pretty normal, right?  The oddities start to come in when you look at the way Adlon approaches the film.  The set and characters are desolate, as if there's always more story behind them onscreen than what meets the eye.  There's Brenda's son, who is obsessed with Bach and read to me as "we're supposed to understand this guy is gay" until randomly the baby that Brenda is always throwing to anyone who will take it turns out to be her son's child, indicating a romantic life with a female that otherwise has not been hinted at before.  We also rarely get any indication as to why Jasmin and her husband seemingly broke up in the middle of the desert (there's a fight over something in the opening scenes, but it's in German and not subtitled, so we have no idea if he'll come back or not, or why he left a coffee canister on the side of the road).  The film is constantly about observation and feeling, but rarely does it make sense to someone who is involved with the plot.

These sorts of dangling participles in the movie should frustrate me more than they did, but the film is interesting and pleasant enough, and the sandy "Calling You" makes you feel a bit finer about the movie.  I've read reviews of the film, and I think it was considered more revolutionary at the time than it is now, a movie essentially where nothing actually happens, but we just check in on a few people who are living on the outskirts of life for a while.  I didn't take much to Pounder (an actress I generally adore) as a screaming woman who seems to only understand two modulations (for the first 70 minutes of the movie, she treats pretty much everyone around her like garbage, which is excusable to an extent considering her hard life but feels rough after a while).  But Bagdad Cafe never stops being interesting, even if you leave it unfulfilled.  The song is probably the movie's best attribute, though it doesn't have the same film-defining chorus of its Oscar vanquisher "Let the River Run" that year, but while I get why critics found it charming, I left pretty uninspired, having witnessed something that clearly had a vision in mind, but can't decide between total abstraction & narratively compelling.