Fear Eats the Soul

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1973, 92 minutes

Superficially a story about a friendship and marriage between Emmi (Brigtte Mira), a lonely, widowed charlady, and Ali (Ben Salem), a Morrocan mechanic half her age, this film is much deeper. Their relationship is viewed with angry disapproval and even hostility by the pair's friends, and through this Fassbinder explores racism and prejudice in modem-day Germany.

The film is a remake of Douglas Sirk's 1955 Hollywood melodrama All That Heaven Allows. Fassbinder pushes the point further than that film did by powerful visuals and a narrative drive which takes the plot to extremes. By doing so he is able to engage his subject in a way which conventional social realism would not permit.

Over a thirteen year period, Fassbinder averaged a film every 100 days, which prodigious and surely draining output makes this film all the more amazing. A more straightforward narrative tale than some of his work, Fear Eats The Soul nevertheless demonstrates Fassbinder's great social, political and psychological awareness, and the way in which he was able to articulate. It is also more approachable than certain of his other films, which makes it all the more worthy of viewing by those who might otherwise be disinclined to attend one of his films; at least in this case they would be missing out.

Review by Iain Lang
Taken from EUFS Programme 1994-95