ANGST ESSEN SEELE AUF (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, or Fear Eats the Soul, 1973) **1/2 A simple tale of racial prejudice that involves no lynchings, explosions, or tearful deportations. The closest thing, in fact, is a family member's foot through the television set. Wilfully dull and featuring an occasionally morally ambivalent sympathetic figure (bearded El Hedi Ben Salem), Werner Rainer Fassbender clearly intends to dramatize the plight of the mundane in the face of the low-intensity reprehensible. He does so to the extent that Brigitti Mira, a putzfrau (cleaning lady) attired in the most hideous polyester representations, appears little less than heroic by the end of the slow developing framework of a dull plot. Fassbender obviously believes that fluid and evolutionary character development is unnecessary, that character can be developed from a choppy hodgepodge of scenes. He makes his case. He shoots the periodic ascended scenes as near stills, through doorways and from a distance. In one of these he mutely communicates the simple reality that while refugees may be uncomfortable in Germany, Germans are even more so in Hitler's restaurant. I may have translated that particular metaphor a bit too literally but the many simple observations on the insidious properties of racism are well made, and made in ways calculated to stick.
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