Sometimes great art, and great movies, are created on a whim or by accident. Rainer Werner Fassbinder was in between two major movie productions and in a relationship with El Hedi ben Salem, when he quickly wrote and directed a story primarily influenced by his love for ben Salem, and one of his favorite movies made by Douglas Sirk (All that Heaven Allows). Sirk’s movie, about an attractive late 40sh housewife’s affair with her young Gardener was taken to its edge by Fassbinder with his “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” by making the housewife into a 60 something unattractive cleaning lady and the gardener into a 30 something dark skinned Muslim mechanic. The result does not only have something to say about racism and prejudice but is one of the most beautiful love stories I have ever seen.
The movie takes place in Berlin and in the same period that the Munich Olympics Massacre occurred. Fassbinder used this time-period to explain the xenophobia concerning Muslims that existed in Germany at the time. Emmi (Brigitte Mira) is an older cleaning lady who walks into the local Arab bar to get out of the heavy rain outside. She orders a cola and the bar owner, who is one of those heavily made-up middle eastern large bosom types, goads her regular customers to ask Emmi to dance. Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) takes her up on the wager, and while dancing with Emmi, finds her to be a very kind and caring person. He will then offer to escort her home, where she invites him to come up until it stops raining. He eventually ends up staying overnight, and their relationship quickly moves forward into a fast civilian marriage. The movie builds on this unlikely romance in an honest and very open manner, while at the same time showcases how the outside world looks down upon their honest relationship with distain.
Ali is not even the mechanic’s real name, but rather a generic reference to a dark-skinned foreign worker in Germany at the time. His real name is too long for most Germans to remember, so they just call their Arab laborers Ali, which further enhances the dehumanization of these same workers. Emmi immerses herself into Ali’s heart, and it is the way she does this that is the soul of the movie. Ali will later tell her that since he arrived in Germany, she is the only person who has expressed an interest in him, and it is that which attracts him to her. In addition, the two main characters feel frowned upon by Berlin society. Emmi because she is a cleaning lady and Ali because he is a dark-skinned foreign worker. She shyly states that she is looked down upon because of her line of work, while he more bluntly states that the Germans look at him like a dog that they are the master of. Considering German history and its efforts to reform, this clear statement of fact from a 1970s Germany showed me that there was still a lot more left to be done on that front. It is the judgmental society that initially draws both to each other while their need for warmth and kindness keeps them together.
One of the delights of this movie is how it shows racism and prejudice to be such a weak and unsustainable emotion. When Emmi and Ali first become a couple, her neighbors try to have Ali expelled from their building for being unclean, even though he is probably the cleanest person in the building (Emmi makes a point of telling them that he takes a shower every day). The local grocer refuses to serve Ali claiming he does not understand his German, Emmi’s co-workers ostracize her at work, and in probably the best scene of the movie, Emmi’s grown children cut themselves off from their mother in protest of the marriage. The scenes of the neighbor’s gossiping and plotting against the couple hark back to Sirk’s movie as well. It is, however, the magnificent and somewhat funny scene where Emmi informs her children about the marriage that is not only the movie’s greatest homage to Douglas Sirk, but also my favorite scene in the movie. The look on each sibling’s face once Ali appears from the bedroom dressed in a suite is priceless. One of the sons kicks in the TV in anger. In Sirk’s movie, the children, after forcing their mother to break up with the gardener, buy her a new TV which symbolized her entrapment into misery. Here the TV is kicked in and broken, because in Fassbinder’s version, Emmi will not listen to her children and chooses happiness over misery.
Fassbinder in his movie also brilliantly shows how practicality and life supersedes most biases in life. Emmi’s neighbor needs the strong young man in the building (Ali) to help them move furniture and other heavy items, the grocer needs Emmi’s business, her colleagues need her to gang up on the younger foreign laborer (an interesting point is that, for acceptability, Emmi agrees to treat this new colleague as badly as she was being treated), and her eldest son pays for the broken TV because he needs Emmi to babysit his children. Simply put, life overcomes stupidity and prejudice. It is this message that Fassbinder lays out without any melodrama or exaggerations. The movie shows life as it is. People overcome prejudice through practicality and need.
If all this movie did was deal with social issues, then it would have been interesting, but within the heart of this small but significant film is a love story. On the outside, there is nothing more different in appearance than Emmi and Ali, and their upbringing as well as culture could not be more separate in nature. Yet it is within their humanity that they find each other. To Fassbinder’s credit, his portrayal of their love is not overly passionate, nor is it akin to a fairy tale. It is their quiet honesty that succeeds in breaking through all the formidable obstacles to their love. When Ali confesses to Emmi that he slept with another woman, she tells him she does not care and only wants them to be kind to each other. That is such a beautiful attitude to love, and I was not surprised that Ali then responded that he did not want another woman and only loved her.
When a movie can make you believe that true love is possible for a 60-year-old Polish/German woman and a 30-year-old Moroccan, it is telling you that love is possible for everyone. “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” may be a small film, but it has a giant heart and a pleasure to behold.
1001 Movies before you die 