cinehunch
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
01
Why this pick
Fassbinder’s key melodramatic touchstone: a socially policed romance framed with vivid emotional precision, where community disapproval turns domestic spaces into quiet battlegrounds.
02
Why this pick
A raw, talk-heavy portrait of fractured relationships and emotional need. Its unvarnished urban intimacy shares the uneasy sense that affection cannot escape social roles.
03
Why this pick
Fassbinder turns marriage into a visually rigorous chamber of coercion, using polished surfaces, ritualised behavior and escalating unease to expose power beneath respectable life.
04
Why this pick
A sharper, more expansive Fassbinder melodrama in which a woman’s private compromises mirror postwar Germany’s social ambitions, with the same cool compositions and fierce emotional undercurrent.
05
Why this pick
Its saturated romantic artifice and aching attention to love constrained by money, work and convention offer a more musical but equally lucid form of social melodrama.
Finding the atmosphere, tension and little details that made this one stay with you.
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01 / THE STORY
The film takes place an unspecified number of months after the Munich Massacre in West Germany. Emmi (Mira), a 60 year-old window cleaner and widow, enters a bar, driven in by the rain and wanting to listen to the music being played inside. A woman in the bar (Katharina Herberg) tauntingly suggests Ali (Salem), a Morocco ''Gastarbeiter'' (guest worker) in his late thirties, ask Emmi to dance, to which Emmi accepts. After they dance, they develop a friendship and Ali follows Emmi home, staying at her apartment for the night. After some more interaction between the two, they start to fall in love and Ali continues to live with Emmi. Emmi decides to visit her children to introduce them to Ali; daughter Krista (Irm Hermann) and her tyrannical son-in-law Eugen (Fassbinder himself); Eugen thinks she is losing her sanity and Krista thinks that her mother - who has been a widow for years - is fantasizing.
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
Emmi Kurowski
Ali
Barbara
Frau Munchmeyer
Automechaniker
Albert
Herr Angermayer
Krista
