Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder with Brigitte Mira and El Hedi ben Salem

I couldn’t quite swallow the premise of the film – a disinterested love affair between a cleaning woman and a Moroccan immigrant some decades her junior. I know it was influenced by Douglas Sirk’s “All That Heaven Allows”, but Brigitte Mira was no Jane Wyman. However I put that aside . . . and thus was impressed by the film and its depiction of the narrow-mindedness in the face of generous emotion.

It’s beautifully shot – tableaux vivants out of Edward Hopper – with clever use of vivid and muted colours. There was also a visually poetic quality in the scenes, with staircases, doorways and metal grilles symbolising characters’ trajectories. Its approach to the social aspect of the love affair and marriage – the racism and disapproval of family and neighbours – took me back to German A level, when we studied “Biedermann und die Brandstifter” and “Der Besuch der alten Dame”. Something about the quasi-didactic nature of the scenes, with characters voicing very negative social norms in the face of so transgressive a relationship – and also when the same characters later accepted the marriage for their own self-interested reasons. That spotlight on social interactions and microscope on morality reminded me of Dürrenmatt.

It was also a film about loneliness and homesickness and the toll of constantly keeping them at bay. The marriage tottered a bit on the disparities of culture and age, but the ending suggested a more optimistic future.

What was also interesting was to consider when it was made. A couple of years after the Munich Olympics massacre (the film was set in Munich) and three decades after WWII. All the middle-aged characters would have been young adults during the war, and the cleaning woman referred to her membership of the Nazi party as something that everyone did. And the actors themselves? What did they do during the war?