Germany
4.5*
Director:
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenwriter:
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Director of Photography:
Jürgen Jürges
Running time: 93 minutes
Original title: Angst essen Seele auf
Xenophobic sentiment is part of the fabric of Fassbinder’s classic, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, but the film is by no means a political drama: It rather occupies a grey zone between politics, romance and a straight-faced delivery of very bad grammar. The speech pattern is even reflected in the grammatically incorrect German title, which translates as “Fear eat up soul”.
One of the two central characters is an immigrant worker from Morocco, whose real name, El Hedi ben Salem M’Barek Mohammed Mustapha, is too complicated for Germans to say, never mind remember, so he is called “Ali” by his German co-workers. Emmi Kurowski is a much older German woman, with Polish roots, who stops for a coffee at a local restaurant one rainy evening, where she sees Ali for the first time.
Both outsiders in their own way, both in need of love, their friendship quickly transforms into much more, to the great disapproval of their separate groups of friends. The setting is Munich, shortly after the chaos of the 1972 Olympic Games, and anti-Arab sentiment is rife among all members of society: Foreigners who have lived in Germany for a long time even forget that they themselves had been new immigrants once upon a time.
Fassbinder’s film was clearly an inspiration to Todd Haynes during the conception of his 2002 film, Far From Heaven, in which a 1950s middle-class white woman from New England strikes up a relationship with her younger, black gardener. Both directors, Haynes and Fassbinder, are gay, and the inevitable interpretation of their films as a pamphlet against prejudice is difficult to avoid. But Fassbinder is much more relaxed about his subject matter than Haynes, whose film dealt with both racism and the marginalisation of homosexuality.
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is rather comically staged: Scenes sometimes consist of mere gazes that go on for a little too long. In this respect, the editing is well executed and very effective in its own unique way.
The film is as relevant and as entertaining today as it must have been upon its release in 1974. Socially, the same gossip is still the order of the day when there is an interracial – and in this case, also, an intergenerational –relationship between two people. Fassbinder does not go for heavy drama but focuses considerable time on the other women living in Emmi’s building and their responses to different situations that involve foreigners. His train of thought is clear but not too simplistic – and perfectly credible.
Fassbinder features as Emmi’s lazy son-in-law and, as all reviews will mention, the role of Ali is played by Fassbinder’s partner at the time, El Hedi ben Salem. While the film never reaches the melodramatic heights of an Almodóvar, a comparison between them might not be such a bad idea.