MOVIE REVIEW : Passion and Art of Shopping : German director examines all-American preoccupation with spending money.

Percy Adlon is one of those filmmakers who never met a quirk he didn’t like. While watching his movies, you half expect to hear him shouting, “That’s it! More quirks!” in the background.

In “Rosalie Goes Shopping,” the German director scratches the surface of a big family living in a small Arkansas town and finds peculiarities to spare.

The Greenspaces, led by the ample Marianne Sagebrecht as Rosalie and Brad Davis as her distracted husband, Ray, prefer TV commercials to the shows, listen happily to tapes of a revving airplane and get misty over home movies of arcane Bavarian festivals. The only normal, all-American thing they seem to do is spend lots of money, even when they don’t have it.

Adlon, as is his wont (remember “Baghdad Cafe?”), makes a minor-key spectacle of their idiosyncrasies. But the movie--being shown tonight as the Laguna Beach Festival of the Arts “Windows Onto an American Landscape” series continues--isn’t just about an odd clan doing odd things. Adlon has something more in mind.

Of the many characteristics that define this country to the rest of the world, hungry consumerism has to be near the top of the list. Buying is a passion and an art; we revel in our materialism. It’s almost a religion to Rosalie who, with her 37 credit cards in hand, goes about filling her own and her family’s needs with an almost beatific romanticism.

As Adlon’s cinematographer, Bernd Heind, captures Rosalie on her daily shopping spree, it’s as if she’s wrapped in a perfect cocoon of purpose. It’s almost irrelevant that she doesn’t have the money to pay for all the stuff. She’s so suffused with serenity and joy that her indiscretions are practically sanctified: I shop, therefore I am. The tinkling background music lends an airy note to Heind’s comforting visuals.

The heart and soul of all Adlon’s movies is Sagebrecht (she was the determined and gentle lover in “Sugarbaby,” the magical Earth mother in “Baghdad Cafe”), who so easily embodies anyone’s notion of woman-as-nurturer. Feminists might not like the way Rosalie starts off as the mother of all mothers, but when she takes a huge leap later on, they’ll likely cheer.

Revealing too much would undermine “Rosalie Goes Shopping’s” ability to surprise, even when Adlon falls into his familiar trap of dwelling on curiosities in over-cute ways. But it’s safe to say that Rosalie reaches a breakthrough after she buys one of her daughters a fancy computer and starts playing with it herself.

Intrigued by the idea of a user’s password (she sees it as a peek into someone’s secret soul), Rosalie invades the computer network for the local rice mill. Developing into a hacker of tremendous skill and chutzpah, she electronically staves off a mill takeover by a voracious Japanese firm and starts a million-dollar business of her own on the side. Adlon has crooked fun with the notion of American banking, especially with our having fallen to debtor-nation status in recent years, and with the can-do entrepreneurial spirit.

Most of Adlon’s cast can’t avoid Sagebrecht’s shadow (it is sweeping, both figuratively and literally). Davis tries, by acting especially weird, but his performance as Ray is the film’s worst. All nutty tics, it unintentionally reveals Adlon’s most obvious weakness--sometimes there’s isn’t much beneath his characters’ strange surfaces.

Judge Reinhold fares better as a local priest who endures Rosalie’s confessions of wanton spending and computer shenanigans. His naive and vulnerable piety provides a funny foil to Rosalie’s let’s-make-things-happen abandon.

* “Rosalie Goes Shopping” is being shown at tonight 6 and 9 at the Festival Forum Theatre on the Festival of the Arts grounds, 650 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach, as part of the “Windows Onto an American Landscape” film series. $4 to $5. (714) 494-1145.