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Zuckerbaby (1985)

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7 comments in total

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4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
OK, not a great film, but..., 23 February 2004

Author: jonr-3 from Kansas City, Missouri, USA

...still, there's something about this movie that is extremely appealing. The strange, offbeat colors underscore the fantasy nature of the story. For the first twenty minutes or so, I just watched with wide-eyed disbelief, expecting something atrocious to happen; then as the story developed I found myself drawn into an unexpectedly tender and touching, yet still fantastic, affair. When the film was over, I found myself reflecting on the characters' motivations and personalities. Trivial films don't have that effect.

Not trivial, then--but not wonderful, either, in any conventional way. Too specialized? I don't know. I plan to watch it again. It's worth that.

I gave it a vote of "seven."

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3 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Very sad and funny German relationship comedy, 24 September 2002

Author: Mikew3001 (mikew4001@yahoo.de) from Hamburg, Germany

The German 1984 comedy "Zuckerbaby" ("Sugarbaby") is the debut film of American director and German resident Percy Adlon who became famous with his following productions like like "Out of Rosenheim" (1987) and "Rosalie goes shopping" (1988), all of them featuring actress Marianne Saegebrecht. In this very sad, bleak but also very touching Bavarian comedy Saegebrecht plays a lonely, over-weight woman in the big city of Munich in her late thirties who works as an udertaker. Her life consist of her sad work, watching TV and eating loads of sweets and cakes. One day, she's falling in love with the voice of a subway driver (played by popular comedian Eisi Gulp), announcing the train stations. She stalking him until he falls in love with her, but their intense romance is only short-lived.

Together with Doris Doerrie's "Maenner" ("Men"), released the same year, "Zuckerbaby" was a blueprint for the very popular German movie genre of the "Beziehungskomoedien" (relationship comedies) in the eighties and nineties. It is shot in a typical colorful 1980's neon style, reflecting the bright lights and loneliness of modern life in the big cities. There are not much dialogues, and the real conversations only start with the beginning of the romance in the middle of the film. There is also a creepy, sad atmosphere of death, loneliness and the longing for love, but the movie works perfect as a human drama as well as a campy love comedy.

The actors are doing a great job, and the minimal harmonica tunes in the background are adding a great atmosphere to the picture. By the way, "Zuckerbaby" was a famous German Rock'n'Roll song from the fifties by Peter Kraus which is constantly played during the movie. If you want to watch one of the best German films of the eighties, "Zuckerbaby" is a good example to recommend.

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
The fascination of weirdness, 3 February 2001

Author: Mort-31 from Vienna, Austria

Most of you will know Percy Adlon only for "Out of Rosenheim`, a film that is weird enough for the American taste. This movie is just as weird but there are fewer people involved. The story is quite simple to tell: A woman falls in love with the voice of an underground announcer and begins an affair with him.

The weird thing is how the story is directed. The colours and moods suggest that there is something mysterious and frightening going on behind the scenes but there isn't. The dialogue and the characters, especially Marianne Sägebrecht's are to take more seriously as the direction which seems to me somewhat playful, not in any way relevant for the development of the plot.

At least, this connection of story and direction brings some fascination. Directed by anyone else then Percy Adlon, "Zuckerbaby` would be not more than another of these unconventional love stories that have been modern since the seventies ("Harold and Maude`, "Spider and Rose`).

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An Adult Love Story for Adults, 31 December 2006

Author: Tahhh from New Haven County, Connecticut

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

I've known this film for many, many years, and it's high on my list of favorites to return to and enjoy again. First, let me warn you that there's a truly disappointing American remake of it, in English, known as "Babycakes," but, unlike this travesty of the original film, I'd say the single adjective which characterizes it for me is "ADULT." The humor--for the first half of the film is hilariously funny--is very grown-up humor; and the actual love story which it becomes, with its tensions and tendernesses, is also very, very mature--I think it quite likely that the movie will only appeal to people who are at least 35, but that they will find considerable truth in the way lust, infatuation, and, eventually, tenderness and caring love--and loss--are portrayed.

The protagonist is a fat, middle-aged, old-maid spinster, who works as a mortician in Munich and, one day, unexpectedly mesmerized by the gentle voice of a youthful, handsome, athletic driver of the Munich U-Bahn (subway, metro), rushes to see the owner of the lovely voice, and becomes obsessed and infatuated with him. The first half of the film tells us the hilarious adventures and desperate measures she goes through to identify him, stalk him, and, ultimately, snare him and seduce him.

*SPOILERS FOLLOW* It is here that the film turns from a trivial farce into a film of depth and true interest; a relation that started as an infatuation driven, on her side by lust and a desire for life and youth in her colorless and depressing life, and, on his side, by a nagging and unpleasant wife who drives him into the arms of a love-affair--this relation CHANGES into one of true affection, caring and tenderness, and the two, who were lusting for one another's surface qualities, slowly discover the real human beings underneath the flesh--and discover that there is more than simply lust and "fun" in their relationship.

The film moves toward a deliberately ambiguous ending that raises questions--many of them--and leaves us haunted by the lives of the two main characters, and their experience.

There are two moments of sexually explicit activity in the film, for people who are touchy about such things, but none of it seems gratuitous "sex for the sake of sex scene" and such scenes are conducted within the bounds of taste, good (not smutty) humor, and leave us with a sense of INTIMACY rather than PORNOGRAPHY.

The real adult nature of the film is in the departure from any sort of expected scenario: like Hitchcock's "Psycho" it is a film which starts off going decidedly in ONE direction, and then takes a sudden, and wonderful turn into a totally unexpected and different direction--we stop laughing, and we start identifying, strongly, and at times, painfully, with the main characters and their brief taste of an escape from their respective lonelinesses.

Can't recommend it highly enough--it's a big favorite of mine.

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1 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
This is for all the fat girls...., 19 July 2005

Author: acrisisblog from United States

Camryn Manheim held up the Emmy Award she won for her role as Ellenor Frutt on The Practice and said..."This is for all the fat girls!" This film liberates "fat girls" in a similar way. Marianne Sägebrecht is "Marianne" the mortician's assistant whose life is as dead as her customers. She rides to work on the subway, listens to the negative comments about her by ladies in the local shops, and takes an occasional swim at the local pool when she needs to just get away and think. All that changes the day she spots Huber, the young handsome subway driver. What chance would a fat middle aged mortician's assistant have of seducing a young handsome blonde man? Marianne proves that hope springs eternal. I enjoyed this film when it was played on Showtime in the late 1980's and I recently tracked down a copy to see it again.

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0 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
$, The Sign of the Beast? 4, 21 January 2008

Author: roig27 from United States

Thsi is an excellent film. You will enjoy the ride, if you like sex, roll and subway stations: the plot is simple. A woman falls in for the train conductor while knowing that she is a fat, over-weight persona. Her aura is splendid though and the conductor falls in for the German: intriguing scenes include the calculus used for the regulations of the train: the workers inside calculations for the work, very difficile work, they do. The train conductor is a fit, young professional. The swimmer, the German, is an obsessed persona looking for sugar, hence the tittle -Sugarbaby-. This art movie, not to be confused with technical films of mental -Altered States- or mechanical reproduction, was made close to the end of the Cold War between the two Hemispheres: the West and the East. It was made in Germany but I am not certain which Germany - in any case there is a cameo of the infamous -Luxemburg- station, the second most reputed m'etro station in Europe. You will enjoy it.

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1 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
5 out of 10, 19 August 1999
Author: Asokan Nirmalarajah (marsellus.wallace@t-online.de) from Cologne, Germany

German director Percy Adlon and actress Marianne Sägebrecht received first major international acclaim for their first collaboration, an extremely stylish and strange, but also charming and unique love story between a unglamorous, overweight female mortician who falls for a naive subway conductor. Though after a while Adlons unusual cinematic visuals turn from original to annoying and in the last third the story takes a bizarre and frustrating change, Adlons intriguing vision of modern-day-relationships and the fine performances, especially by the attractive Sägebrecht keeps the movie going.

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