Rosalie Goes Shopping
D: Percy Adlon (1989); with Marianne Sägebrecht, Judge Reinhold, Brad Davis, Alex Winter, Courtney Kraus.
Rosalie (Sägebrecht) goes shopping, all right, and buys everything she can get her hands on, whether she needs it or not. Problem is, she doesn’t always have money to pay for things, so she resorts to every kind of bad check and credit card scam she can think of. Her husband Ray (Davis) is a crop duster pilot who’s largely oblivious to her sketchy financial habits, but loves their lifestyle of conspicuous consumption. A daughter then twists Rosalie’s arm to buy her a PC, and soon Rosalie goes from master scam artist to master hacker. Adlon also cast the plus-size Sägebrecht in Bagdad Cafe a few years earlier; in both films she has a poise and charm that carries much of the movie along (Sägebrecht has long been a sex symbol in Germany). Bagdad Cafe‘s characters were quirky but likable, with Sägebrecht squarely in the middle; that film had an offbeat appeal that made it hard to dislike. Unfortunately, Rosalie Goes Shopping strives a little too mightily for the same sort of feel. Set in the shack-and-a-tree terrain of Stuttgart, Arkansas, Rosalie’s family consists of a pair of twins, a gourmet chef, her clueless husband, a son in the army, and her stridently irritating German parents. Still, Adlon doesn’t invest enough into this motley crew to generate much interest in any of them aside from Rosalie and Ray. He tends toward inappropriately flashy camera work and intercuts 1989-era computer graphics into scenes; the graphics are about on the level of a kid’s Lite-Brite game and are incredibly distracting. Rosalie Goes Shopping has a smirking preciousness that gets in the way of its broad satire of American consumerism (we can only guess that is what Adlon is getting at) and is nowhere near as engaging as Bagdad Cafe. It’s still worth seeing for its weird setpieces and for Sägebrecht; the director’s adoration of the actress saturates the film.
This article appears in July 6 • 2001.