The third (and final) part in Percy Adlon's "Marianne" trilogy, ROSALIE GOES SHOPPING is a respectable attempt to maintain the runaway success of Adlon's last feature, BAGDAD CAFE. It's always hard to follow a hit, but Adlon certainly hasn't missed the mark this time. Marianne Sagebrecht,
as chubbily charming as ever, stars as Rosalie, a German peacetime bride residing in her GI husband's hometown of Stuttgart, Arkansas. Although she has lived in Arkansas many years and raised her ridiculously harmonious family there, she still yearns for Bavaria, for Bad Tolz, and--even more--to
spend, spend, spend...but not her own money. With her collection of 37 credit cards, skill at fraud and forgery, and her ability to wheedle husband Davis' pay packet from his boss weeks before it's due, Sagebrecht indulges all her own and her family's whims and fancies. Each time she commits
another act of embezzlement, she rushes off to confession to clear her soul of guilt. The day Sagebrecht gives a megacomputer to her daughter is the day her life changes for good, the stakes becoming much higher. As a bold, canny computer hacker, Sagebrecht begins to shuffle stocks around the
markets and to move cash around bank accounts. One day, her friendly postman gives her a tip--"If you owe the bank $100,000, it's your problem; if you owe them a million, it's theirs"--and from that point on she never looks back.
Adlon's film plays off its cute love-hate relationship with materialism, in which Sagebrecht's practical Bavarian acquisitiveness meets childlike American consumer decadence. This satiric marriage is a happy one--a fantasy in which the client rips off the bank and not vice versa. leave a comment