Rainer Werner Fassbinder's crocodile-tearjerker about the romance and marriage of a sixtyish German scrubwoman and a young Moroccan immigrant. It's a crossbreed of two Douglas Sirk tearjerkers of the Fifties, All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life, and twice as hard to swallow as either of those. Fassbinder clicks off a series of soap-opera clichés (the gossip, the social snubs, the embarrassment of not knowing how to order in a four-star restaurant, etc.), but his sense of irony and mockery makes the characters easier to philosophize about than empathize with. Brigitte Mira, El Hedi Ben Salem. (1974) — Duncan Shepherd
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