Sugarbaby

1985 romantic comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A lonely woman who works with corpses at a funeral home falls for and begins stalking a subway train operator.

This is a movie with two distinct halves, the first which I enjoyed a lot more. The first half, when we meet our main character and watch her fall in love with this guy and begin laying her trap to seduce him, reminded me of Kaurismaki or Jarmusch. There wasn't a lot of dialogue, and the camera wasn't doing a whole lot of anything in most of the scenes. There were a lot more cuts than a Kaurismaki or Jarmusch film, a montage showing this woman's lonely life, one in which she doesn't seem to have any sort of connections at all with anything that isn't food. The first shot, one where she's floating in a pool, has another human being in it--one who is squeegeeing the sides of the pool. But there's no interaction at all between them, and you get the sense right off the bat that all of Marianne's human relationships are just about the same as that. The way this character's loneliness is created visually really reminds me of a silent movie.

The random shots of escalator steps, subterranean architecture, and off-colored meats in a supermarket add to this quirky visual style. Most conspicuous is the use of striking colors. The color palette isn't all that strange for something that came out in the mid-80s, but it still gives the movie an unexpected look. Add that weird rhythm to the quirky use of colors, and you've got something that could have been pretty special. There are great early scenes, including the one where the woman and her love interest sort-of meet for the first time.

Unfortunately, I didn't dig the second half nearly as much. Weighed down with conversations I didn't really care about, the movie kind of lost its freshness. Additionally, there were some extended scenes where the camera was swirling around the room, and I couldn't figure out why. The playful camera and use of montage vanished in this second part of the movie, and the director (Percy Adlon) only seemed to have one trick left up his sleeve which he repeated over and over again. The colors remained, but they weren't enough.

The ending also reminded me of Jarmusch, by the way. And so did a scene where a pair of characters are playing foosball.

Marianne Sagebrecht was really good, an uncharacteristic leading lady. She's in other Percy Adlon movies. I don't believe I've seen anything else by Adlon, but I liked this enough to check out Bagdad Cafe sometime.