Like Rainer Werner Fassbinder's other recent imitations of life, Fear Eats the Soul [Angst essen Seele auf] achieves a remarkable balance between stylisation and realism….

The movie is an expansion/revision of a story told by a minor character in Fassbinder's own Der amerikanische Soldat [The American Soldier] (1970), and also a remake/revision of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955). Its plot is an extraordinary mesh of low-key melodrama and social criticism….

Angst essen Seele auf begins like a fairy-tale: as in a dream, Emmi is lured into the Moroccan bar by the Arab music on its juke-box, and invited to dance for what is evidently the first time in many years. Stage by stage, everything that follows is hilariously—and agonisingly—predictable, Fassbinder plays on audience expectations so thoroughly that his exposition astonishes by its very exhaustiveness. The types of racial fear and prejudice are catalogued succinctly...