Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (#086)

Directed by: Rainer Werner Fassbinder » Written by: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974 » Region/Time: West Germany, 93 minutes

Starring: Brigitte Mira as Emmi Kurowski » El Hedi ben Salem as Ali » Barbara Valentin as Barbara » Irm Hermann as Krista » Elma Karlowa as Mrs. Kargus » Anita Bucher as Mrs. Ellis » Gusti Kreissl as Paula » Rainer Werner Fassbinder as Eugen.

“Happiness is not always fun”

This is the title card that opens German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s melodrama Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. It is Munich in the mid-1970s and Emmi, a 60-year-old, widowed cleaner enters an exotic bar, ostensibly because it is raining, but maybe because she’s always been curious about the Egyptian music. The occupants of the bar stare at her, as she sits down and orders a coke. One of the customers, Ali, is taunted by his friends to ask Emmi for a dance, which he does. Perhaps feeling sorry for her or perhaps because she is polite and interested in what he has to say, he accompanies her home and ends up staying for the night.

In economical vignettes, we see Emmi and Ali fall in love and get married. She craves company and attention, and he craves someone who treats him like a human being. As Ali says in his broken German at one point, “Arabs not human in Germany.” Well versed in the theatre, Fassbinder stages many of his scenes through doorways, heightening the loneliness of the two main characters.

However, as this is melodrama of the Douglas Sirk variety, we can be sure that everything will not work out quite so easily. Elli’s neighbours, her co-workers and her three children, all display ferocious hatred of Ali and disgust at their marriage. Her co-workers and neighbours call all Arab immigrants “stinky, unwashed pigs.” In the face of this treatment from others and her overwhelming love for Ali, Elli tells him she is afraid. “Do not be afraid,” says Ali. “Fear eats the soul.”

We are shown the flipside of Ali and Elli’s seemingly perfect marriage in Elli’s daughter, Krista’s. Her and her husband, played by Fassbinder himself, are completely dysfunctional, and he embodies all of the negative qualities her fellow German’s are accusing the Arab population of possessing.

Eventually, Elli’s family, coworkers, neighbours and even the local grocer begin to accept Elli’s marriage, but perhaps only because they want something from her.

However, the simple statement that “racism is bad”, is not what Fassbinder was going for. After getting married, Elli takes Ali to a restaurant where Hitler used to eat before WWII. “I’ve always wanted to eat here. Hitler, you know?” It turns out that Elli, like most German people, was a member of the Nazi Party. We know she is a good person, so how could this be? Fassbinder shows throughout the movie in numerous ways that hatred and ignorance are not what allow racism to pervade a society. To become a racist society, inaction, apathy and complacency are also required. In a later scene, Elli’s coworkers are conspiring about a salary increase and deliberately leave out the “new girl” because she is from Yugoslavia, in the same way they earlier left out Eli because of her marriage. Rather than stand up to them, she is delighted, because they now accept her, and joins in the shunning.

In the last segment of the movie, Fassbinder suggests Ali is beginning to feel confined and objectified by Elli. He leaves her to spend time with his Arab buddies and to sleep with the bartender of the bar, who also makes him couscous. In the final minute, Ali and Elli reconcile their differences before he collapses of a perforated stomach ulcer.

Fassbinder, an openly gay filmmaker who would cruise the bar scene by night in search of drugs and sex, was known as the rebel leader of the New German Cinema, which also included Werner Herzog (Aguirre, Rescue Dawn, Grizzly Man) and Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire). Between 1966 and his suicide by drug overdose in 1982, Fassbinder completed over forty films. Amongst his filmography, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, The Marriage of Maria Braun and Veronika Voss are among the most accessible, and it pained me to leave Lola off of this list. Modern melodramas that owe a significant debt to the work of Fassbinder include Pedro Almodovar’s films (e.g. All About My Mother), Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven and, to some extent, the films of Innartu, like Babel.

Fassbinder’s ultimate thesis, that outbreaks of stomach ulcers in Arab immigrant workers were caused by the stress of racism and hatred, was proven to be false in the early 1980s. Two Australian researchers, Warren and Marshall, discovered that ulcers were caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and not by stress or spicy foods. For their work they won the 2005 Nobel Prize.

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