Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

Rainer Werner Fassinder's ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL from 1974 really got to me.  It wasn't the first May/December romance I've seen and will hardly be the last.  But rare is a film to be so honest and complex with its subject (and subjects).  Many such stories draw the principals as either saints or pricks.  Maybe they show a moment or two of uncharacteristic behavior.  Fassbinder not only makes his characters capable of contradictory behavior (like humans do), where people's motivations are calculated, genuine, primal, opportunistic, objectifying, and even unconditionally loving.  Sometimes within the same individual. Fassbinder also uses all of  that to create a timeless essay on class and race, one perhaps more relevant at this late date than ever.

Emmi (Brigitte Mira) is about sixty.  She's a widow in West Germany who cleans houses.  You might describe her as frumpy.  One night she meets "Ali" (El Hedi be Salem) a handsome laborer from Morocco in his 30s.  Under somewhat awkward circumstances, they share a dance in a bar and discover an easy rapport.  They chat well into the night and Ali even spends it with Emmi.  Both characters are likeable and warm, quite different from the others we meet in this film.  The couple will grow closer and even eventually get married.  Emmi's neighbors and children balk in disapproval, their racism not even attempted to be hidden.  Even the kindly grocer refuses to serve a woman who would associate with a dirty animal.

Despite the cold shoulder from everyone in her life, Emmi has never been happier, sharing a love she didn't know possible.  But for how long? As the epigraph states during the opening titles "Happiness is Not Always Fun".  And how long will the lovers remain true to what brought them together? Violate that unconditional love with selfishness? Deny the other's identity?  Ali becomes (has always been?) afraid.  He speaks like a robot, almost pre-programmed, but yet there is a soul within.  A mind capable of self analysis.  What is the fear? Being in a foreign country? Being ignored? Being killed for the color of his skin? Being in love, rather than just in lust with sour barmaids?

Fassbinder made ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL quickly and with relatively little money, but may well have created his masterpiece. His highly creatively use of the camera and staging of his actors is consistently fascinating and disconcerting.  You'd think there are only so many ways to frame a scene of actors communicating with each other and damned if the director doesn't discover something different.  Not to rub viewers' faces in the technique but to bring home the emotions that much stronger.  What this film says about the human condition is far more valid and valuable than most anything out there today.  This is a beautiful and devastating motion picture, without ever being overwrought.