Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

"Arabs not human in Germany"

In the opening scene of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, a lonely old cleaning lady named Emmi (Brigitte Mira) comes in out of the Berlin rain to an Arabic bar. The camera dramatically zooms in on her from far away, and then does the same for Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), a Moroccan migrant-worker about twenty years her junior. Thus starts one of the more improbable romances to be put on film, a tale of forbidden love that flies in the face of 1970s German society. Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the proponents of 'New German Cinema', a realism-influenced movement of filmmaking where younger directors took inspiration from the French New Wave to re-vitalise their country's film industry with the use of low budget and open-minded filmmaking. Here Fassbinder draws on the influence of Hollywood's golden era king of romantic melodrama, Douglas Sirk, to pass comment on contemporary Germany in an unlikely fable.

Emmi is a widow seemingly unaware of racial prejudice, everything about Ali and his culture is a wonder to her. Ali is a put-upon migrant worker who lives a meaningless life of work and drink. In each other they find companionship and unexpected love but Emmi is unprepared for the discrimination and ostracisation they will face and she impulsively decides to marry him. Soon her children disown her, shops won't serve them, her friends shun her and her neighbours tell her she has to clean the communal stairway because her new husband is 'dirty'. Ali is impassive to such familiar racism, and he retreats into his culture (represented by the Arabic bar) if it gets too much for him. A strain begins to appear in their idyllic marriage in due course, and the relationship seems quite doomed from this point.


There's an initial lightness to Fassbinder's film that makes it quite an enjoyable piece of enlightening storytelling. Ali is the minority in Germany, but Emmi is the outsider in his Arabic bar... and her initial alienation there foreshadows society's reaction to their marriage, a reflection of Germany's resentful attitude towards these new migrants in the '60s and '70s. The film's last act seems almost farcial in its strangeness, examining fundamental differences in Emmi and Ali that seem irreconcilable. By this point the society that discriminated so badly against them has done a bizarre about-face - a narrative twist that represents the needs of white society to adapt to the influx of multiculturalism. It's telling that the only outright positive attitudes towards their racial mixing are Emmi's landlord and the police; both are authoritarian figures, and indicate Germany's official position on discrimination - that they're at odds with the way the rest of society reacts is symbolic of the gap between the law and the attitudes of the public. The scene where Ali and Emmi eat in a restaurant that's famous for being Hitler's eating spot is pure irony, but it's also demonstrative of the way modern Germany in the '70s continued to struggle with its troubled past regarding attitudes to race.

What makes Ali: Fear Eats the Soul a real standout is the way it follows Ali and Emmi's relationship beyond simple discrimination and prejudice to look at more complex issues such as assimilation and stress through passive resistance. The film becomes a genuine dialogue about racism and the dawning of a new era in Germany, and that it also manages to be an entertaining love story is a welcome bonus. Some other films from the New German Cinema movement tend to be slowly-paced or overtly artsy (such as Werner Herzog's earliest films), but Fassbinder's film is nothing of the sort and should more than an idle curiosity for any fan of great storytelling and thoughtful cinema.

DIRECTOR: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
WRITER/SOURCE: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
KEY ACTORS: Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbera Valentin, Irm Hermann, Marquard Bohm, Walter Sedlmayr

RELATED TEXTS:
- This film was influenced directly by the Douglas Sirk films All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life. Both Sirk's films and Fassbinder's film went on to influence the Todd Haynes film Far From Heaven.
- Fassbinder's other most well-known films are The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, The Merchant of Four Seasons, The Marriage of Maria Braun and Berlin Alexanderplatz.

AWARDS
Cannes Film Festival - won FIPRESCI Prize and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. Also nominated for the Palme d'Or.