Percy Adlon’s first Marianne Sägebrecht vehicle, “Sugarbaby” (Zucerkbaby), has very garish, often irritatingly affected lighting, much of it seemingly provided by neon. For some of the scenes (and if there were such a word) “darking” would be more approrpiate a label than “lighting.” Some scenes really seem not to be lit at all (shooting by “natural light” when there is no light?). It also has excessively swirling camera movements and some seemingly random camera placements by cinematographer Johanna Heer.

What makes the technical showing off worth tolerating is that the focus of the film is on the great Marianne Sägebrecht -- more so than in Adlon’s better-known (and best!) film, “Bagdad Cafe,” or in “Rosalie Goes Shopping,” the two films he subsequently made with her. She is big-hearted as well as being large-bodied She is great in bulk, but she also as great in determination when she decides to change her life and go after what she wants. What she wants is a romance with a married subway driver named Eisi Huber (played by Eisi Gulp).

Sägebrecht plays a mortuary worker named Marianne who has no friends, no life, a job that is not merely “dead end” but literally involves working on the dead. She gets a minuscule amount of exercise in a swimming pool (floating more than swimming), eats a lot of junk food, and falls asleep to the drone of her television every night. As she begins to stalk Eisi, she has a makeover (one not involving any weight reduction). She demands and gets some of her accumulated vacation leave and learns the intricacies of subway driving schedules.

Generally, I would be uncomfortable with the kind of stalking, but when it is Sägebrecht going after and getting what she wants, I can’t force myself to mind -- not least because she makes Eisi happy. With his ever-shifting work schedule and a careerist wife, he has no friends either. As physically unmatched as they seem (he is all muscle, she all fat), they make each other happy.

Although I do not think it is done with any particularly cinematic panache (it comes as pillow talk), I do like that the viewer learns quite a bit of her past, and some of her prey’s, too (in contrast to much of the “new German cinema” that eschews background explanations or filling in motivations).

I don’t want to give away the ending. The wife does not do what I thought she was going to do (given what I thought was foreshadowing about in her husband's fear).

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I have written epinions about two other Adlon films:the magical "Bagdad Cafe" with Sägebrecht at
http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-4614-506EDE9-39CA43E7-prod5
and the toruously slow "Celeste" about Proust's housekeeper at
http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-5424-47CDE92-39B12D75-prod1


Recommended:
Yes