The story of Fear Eats the Soul remains Fassbender's best at melodrama mode, telling the love story between a local female cleaner in her 60s and a young foreign worker. The story is inspired by Douglas Seck's "Deep Locked Spring," which also tells the emotional entanglement between a middle-aged widow and a young gardener.
The film shows in a calm and objective way the various criticisms and changes that Ali and Amy encountered in the process of falling in love.
The love affair between Ali and Amy has a double difference of age and race. This difference makes the love of two people seem out of place in the eyes of others. Fassbender makes extensive use of long shots in the film to isolate the relationship between the lovers and others. Neighbors in the same building, restaurant waiters, grocers, and even the audience were placed in the position of onlookers or voyeurs by the director. The indifference of the camera contrasts sharply with the intimacy between the two. Ali and Amy, the much-maligned couple, were isolated in a small space by the director and fell in love with each other.
Other characters in the film have been trying to unravel the intimacy that Ali and Amy have built that go against traditional values. The director set up all kinds of obstacles for the couple. The discrimination and prejudice against foreign workers by Amy's colleagues, the cynicism of neighbors, the rage of children, and Ali's friends kept trying to bring him back to his original life. But instead of counteracting their passion for love, these obstacles created a feeling of rebellion against Ali and Amy. Driven by this emotion, they resolutely walked into the marriage hall regardless of criticism and provocation.
As time slowly dilutes discrimination and criticism. The people around were also used to the couple. The determination to rebel has gradually lost its passion. The ordinary life brought a fatal blow to the love of the two. Amy wants to return to a normal life, but Ali begins to miss the good old days of being single, and irreconcilable emotions are pulling each other between the two.
When analyzing the material of this film, the official statement is that the ordinary life of the Germans and the themes of foreign labor have always been the focus of Fassbender's constant attention, and the love between old and young is influenced by Fassbender's childhood memories.
In addition to the background of the times and psychological analysis, the film is actually based on Fassbender's living conditions at that time.
The actor who played the foreign worker in the film, Al Heidi Ben Salem, was Fassbender's lover at the time. It can be said that this simple film is a true representation of the real situation faced by Fassbender and his gay lover. The director used the embarrassing romance between foreign workers and locals to insinuate the embarrassment and criticism of his gay identity in real life. It is conceivable that all those little disturbing details in the film come from Fassbender's personal experience. For example, when Amy and her colleagues were discussing foreign workers, she was hesitant to speak, trying her best to explain her ambiguous attitude but not wanting to be exposed; she was embarrassed and helpless when her children didn't understand; she was pointed out as an alien in public point; often described as dirty, perverted, unacceptable, etc.
Eight years after the filming was completed. Al Heidi Ben Salem stabbed three people in Berlin under the combined effects of stress and alcohol, and eventually hanged himself in prison. The last words he said to Fassbender before going to prison were: "Now you don't need to be afraid anymore." In June of the same year, the thirty-seven-year-old Fassbender died of drugs and alcohol.
This is how the story ends.
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