Rosalie Goes Shopping

Rosalie (Sägebrecht) would seem to have it made: her crop duster hubby (Davis) dotes on her, her countless kids dote on her, even her priest (Reinhold) is less than harsh in his condemnation of her penchant for cheque and credit card fraud. But Rosalie - a corpulent, ever-smiling hausfrau who has landed up in Stuttgart, Arkansas - is so infected by the material greed of the American Way that she can never own enough. Adlon's third film with Sägebrecht may have been conceived as an anarchic dig at Western capitalism, but it is so smugly conspiratorial that any such intentions have been transformed into a paean to avaricious cunning. Ethics aside, the film also suffers from having no plot to speak of; a good hour is spent dwelling on the loveable wackiness of Rosalie's brood, and the mix of sluggish sentiment and forced eccentricity is tiresomely reminiscent of Capra's oddball simple folk in You Can't Take It With You. Adlon does his usual stuff with bright-coloured decor, but the vaguely modernist veneer can't conceal the dearth of genuine feeling at the film's manipulative core.