Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) (Angst essen Seele Auf)
Directed by Ranier Werner Fassbinder
Written by Ranier Werner Fassbinder
1974/West Germany
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/Criterion Channel
One of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

Emmi Kurowski: But when we’re together, we must be nice to each other. Otheriwse, life’s not worth living.

I love Fassbinder’s melodramatic take on prejudice and racism.

Emmi Kurowski (Brigitte Mira) is a homely middle-aged widow who works as a cleaning lady.  One day she steps into a convenient barroom to get out of the rain.  It turns out the bar caters to foreign workers, mostly Arabs.  Arabs are all called “Ali” by the Germans. One of the girls dares an Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) to dance with Emmi.  He does.  They find they can share their troubles with each other and fall in love.  Emmi invites Ali to move in.

The relationship is condemned and mocked by virtually everyone including: Emmi’s neighbors, her co-workers, her children, local shopkeepers, and Ali’s co-workers.  Emmi is frequently referred to an an “old whore”.  The landlord threatens to evict Emmi for “subletting” her apartment.  So the couple marries.  Emmi’s children disown their mother. Things get so bad that the couple takes an out of town trip.  When they return they find that attitudes have changed.  Can this relationship survive?  With director Fassbinder as Emmi’s son-in-law, Irm Hermann as her daughter, and Barbara Valentin as the bar owner.

This is sort of Fassbinder’s take on Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) with an interracial relationship adding more social condemnation to the intergenerational one in that film.  We even get a scene of the children smashing the TV they bought to help relieve their mother’s loneliness The images are stunning and the story is still very relevant. Fassbinder also takes on Germany’s Nazi past and current German prejudice against its much needed foreign work force, highlighting the stress faced by these workers.   The acting is fantastic, though El Hedi ben Salem is clearly an amateur.  His performance works though.  Recommended.