by Jaime Grijalba.
The first minutes of this German film directed by R.W. Fassbinder are among the most perfect representations of instant attraction that have ever made their way into a film, just by a simple succession of elements that on top of each other mean something deep and really important towards the multi-cultural and heavily sentimental aspects that the rest of the film will then explore. Just as the title announces, it is a movie about fear, about what people might say about you, and the fear of what you think about yourself, the fear of how much of that will actually destroy you, the fear of how much it would affect you, how much damage will that make to your personal life in the end, no matter how much you don’t actually care about what people are saying about you, it’s a movie that is bleak in the way that portrays the reprobation of the majority towards a subject, it’s a mean movie towards its protagonists, as it doesn’t leave them an easy way out, as it presents by itself when the fear has already run through the bodies of those who understand and lived it. (more…)