Film

Fear Eats the Soul (1973)

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

A deceptively simple tale of the doomed love affair between an ageing cleaner (Mira) and a young Moroccan gastarbeiter (immigrant worker) which exposes the racial prejudice and moral hypocrisy at the heart of modern West German society. Drawing upon the conventions of Hollywood melodrama (the film has many similarities to Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows), Fassbinder uses dramatic and visual excess to push everyday events to extremes, achieving a degree of political and psychological truth not accessible through mere social realism. Watch for Fassbinder himself as the reptilian son-in-law, and relish the scene in which Mira's son kicks in the television to demonstrate his disgust at the idea of her marrying an Arab.

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