I saw this movie, Bagdad Cafe, about 20 years ago, and like its theme song, it has haunted me in a subtle way. The movie starts out like the song:

A desert road from Vegas to nowhere
Some place better than where you've been
A coffee machine that needs some fixing
In a little cafe just around the bend.

A marital argument ends with a German tourist couple giving up angrily on each other, the wife, Jasmin (played by Marianne Sägebrecht), grabbing her suitcase and walking down a hot, lonely highway; her husband driving off in the other direction.

Nearby, another argument splits another married couple, and the husband takes off in his car, leaving his fed-up, yelling wife, Brenda (CCH Pounder), on her own to run the Bagdad Gas & Oil Cafe, a faded and dusty outpost in the Mojave Desert that's already a beat-down relic 20 years ago when the movie was new.

That's when Jasmin shows up, face glistening from the hot desert sun beating down hard and the exertion of pulling her suitcase on its little wheels. She's wearing a skirt and jacket, low-heeled pumps, and a hat -- definitely not from around here. She rents a room for the night... and ends up staying a while.

There are no car crashes, no chase scenes, no huge spectacles here. There are just these two women, circling each other.... Brenda, whose life is rooted in Bagdad and whose children are out of her control, becomes suspicious of Jasmin, and Jasmin has nothing in Bagdad and  nowhere else to go. Jack Palance plays Rudi Cox, an artist from Hollywood (where he used to paint scenery) who falls for the stealth charm of Jasmin. The characters are treated with warmth and a compassion infused with humor. And there's even magic. This is one of those quirky movies that gives "quirky" a good reputation.

If you've ever suffered from either a rut or felt the tug of wanderlust calling you, see if you don't end up longing for a little Bagdad Cafe in your life. You can get a taste of it from the South San Francisco Main Library's DVD collection.