West German Film Maker Focuses on Rural America : Movies: Director Percy Adlon will appear at UC Irvine tonight to introduce and discuss his film ‘Bagdad Cafe,’ both a critical and an art house success.

Director Percy Adlon, a West German, set his first English-language film, “Bagdad Cafe,” in a ramshackle motel and roadhouse in a dusty corner of the Mojave Desert. His newest film is set in Stuttgart--Stuttgart, Ark., not West Germany.

Adlon--who will be at UC Irvine tonight to introduce a screening of “Bagdad Cafe” and to answer questions--takes his camera to distinctly American places that somehow escape the attention of American directors. To Adlon, these small town places, and the people in them, are America.

“It’s only ‘out of the way’ from a big city point of view. It’s 95% of the country,” Adlon said Wednesday, framed by the picture window of his office in a Westwood high-rise.

“This is what I learned as a documentary film maker: There are no ordinary people,” Adlon said. “I really believe in ‘ordinary’ situations and people which I discover, finally, to be very extraordinary.”

In “Bagdad Cafe,” a hefty Bavarian housewife (played by the delightful Marianne Sagebrecht) is stranded in the desert after a fight with her husband, and walks to the tiny town of Bagdad where she slowly develops a friendship with a feisty cafe owner (played by CCH Pounder).

Sagebrecht returns in the new film, “Rosalie Goes Shopping,” as a mother of seven who manages to pad her husband’s salary--he’s a crop-duster pilot, played by Brad Davis--through increasingly brazen acts of credit fraud. The only person who knows what she is doing is the priest (played by Judge Reinhold), who hears her confession every day.

“If you confess your sins, they’re not sins anymore,” Adlon said. “He gets more and more interested. He’s actually waiting for her (every day), like people waiting for a sequel.”

The movie, he said, is a satire on a consumer society: “It’s not aggressive against people, because I like people, but aggressive against the system,” which he called “a prison of spending money.”

Adlon first used Sagebrecht, whom he discovered in a small stage production in Munich, in the film “Sugarbaby.” While he refers to her affectionately as “my big Bavarian beauty queen,” he said that this is the last film they will do together, at least for a while. “For the time being, it’s completed now, our little trilogy,” he said.

Adlon, who continues to live primarily in Munich, has been in Los Angeles since September to arrange distribution of “Rosalie Goes Shopping,” which opens in San Francisco Feb. 9 and in Los Angeles March 3.

“Bagdad Cafe,” a critical and art house success, is a warm and hopeful film. Adlon, who said he does not always want to play the “soft card,” turned to the satire of the new film as a way of keeping a sense of variety.

While he described “Bagdad Cafe” as a film about the “real paradise of friendship,” the new movie, he said, is about the “false paradise of the shopping mall.”

Percy Adlon will introduce “Bagdad Cafe” at 9 p.m. in the university’s Physical Sciences Lecture Hall. After the screening, Adlon will answer questions from the audience. Admission: $2 to $4. Information: (714) 856-5588.