One evening in Munich, an elderly cleaning lady (Brigitte Mira) escapes from the rain into a bar frequented by immigrants. To her surprise, the jukebox plays an old German tango and a handsome young Moroccan (El Hedi ben Salem) asks her to dance... So far, so like a fairy tale, but this tenderest of romances is soon exposed to the brutal reality of racism and ageism.

This unconventional love story combines lucid social analysis with devastating emotional power. Not a shot is wasted in this bold reworking of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, which unfolds with gripping simplicity.

“Both a wonderful demonstration of how film form creates meaning – the isolating framing and composition, the deliberately stiff performance style – and a moving, unusual odd-couple romance that highlights the hypocrisies and prejudices of society. This reworking of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) manages to be both more emotionally involving (while somehow remaining detached) and much bleaker than the original.” David Morrison

“Fear Eats the Soul is a sad, brilliant expression of Fassbinder’s micropolitics.” Alonso Díaz de la Vega

“No director has deconstructed and rearticulated a genre like Fassbinder and melodrama.” Mike Mashon

Film	Year	Director
Partie de campagne	1936	Jean Renoir
To Be or Not to Be	1942	Ernst Lubitsch
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp	1943	Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Paisan	1946	Roberto Rossellini
The Band Wagon	1953	Vincente Minnelli
Vertigo	1958	Alfred Hitchcock
Wavelength	1967	Michael Snow
Fear Eats the Soul	1974	Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Fanny and Alexander	1982	Ingmar Bergman
Aruitemo aruitemo	2008	Hirokazu Koreeda

Heather Stewart

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