Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
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| Ali: Fear Eats the Soul | |
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| Directed by | Rainer Werner Fassbinder |
| Produced by | Rainer Werner Fassbinder |
| Written by | Rainer Werner Fassbinder |
| Starring | Brigitte Mira El Hedi ben Salem Barbara Valentin Irm Hermann |
| Music by | Rainer Werner Fassbinder (uncredited) |
| Release date(s) |  March 5, 1974 31 October 1974 |
| Running time | 93 min. |
| Language | German,Arabic |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (German: Angst essen Seele auf) is a 1974 West German film written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and starring Brigitte Mira and El Hedi ben Salem. The film won two awards at the Cannes Film Festival and is considered to be one of Fassbinder's most powerful works. Brigitte Mira received the German Film Award for her performance.
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[edit] Title
The original German title Angst essen Seele auf is deliberately grammatically incorrect, translating as "Fear eat up soul" or more literally "Angst consume soul". The correct German form would be "Angst isst die Seele auf" - which (without the definite article "die") became the title of a related 2002 short film also starring Mira. The grammatical incorrectness of the title is however entirely accurate, as it is a direct reference to one of the Ali character's lines where he speaks in what can be referred to as "broken German", which is consistent throughout the film. The line of dialogue he utters is simply "Fear eat soul".
[edit] Synopsis
The story concerns Ali (Salem), a young Moroccan Gastarbeiter (guest worker) in his late thirties, and Emmi (Mira), a 60-year-old widowed cleaning woman. They meet when Emmi ducks inside a bar, driven by the rain and drawn by the exotic music. The German bartender Barbara suggests Ali ask Emmi to dance, and she accepts. A strange and unlikely friendship develops, then a romance and finally they decide to marry. What follows is a bitter and violent reaction over their relationship. Gossipy neighbors treat them with contempt, complaining the building is now filthy. Emmi is shunned by her coworkers, and Ali faces discrimination at every turn. When Emmi, whose first husband was a Polish worker she married against her Hitler-loving father's wishes, invites her three married children to meet her husband, they openly reject him. One of her sons smashes in her TV set in anger, her other son declares she must have lost her sanity, and her daughter and her son-in-law leave "the pigsty" immediately.
Emmi and Ali take a long vacation together to escape the discrimination. After their return, they suddenly face social acceptance, but without the external stress on their relationship, Emmi and Ali need to reconsider the terms of their relationship. Emmi begins to take Ali for granted, shows off Ali's muscles to her neighbors, remarking how clean he is. Ali starts an affair with bartender Barbara who cooks couscous for him. Just when it seems as if the relationship is beyond repair, Emmi goes back to the bar to meet with Ali. They dance again and agree that the only thing that’s important is that they are together, and that they must be nice to each other. In this moment, Ali collapses in Emmi's arms from a burst stomach ulcer. The film ends with Emmi visiting Ali in the hospital.
[edit] Production
The film was shot in just under two weeks, and was planned as an exercise in film-making for Fassbinder, to fill in the time in his schedule between the work on two other films, Martha and Effi Briest . Ironically, it is considered to be one of his best films.
Ali is played by El Hedi ben Salem, who was Fassbinder's partner at the time. Ben Salem committed suicide in jail several years later. Barbara is played by Austrian actress Barbara Valentin, who was in the 1980s a partner of Freddie Mercury, lead singer of the band Queen. Fassbinder himself has a cameo appearance as Emmi's son in law.
[edit] Film references
Ali is in part an homage to the films of Douglas Sirk, in particular Imitation of Life and All That Heaven Allows. The most overt homage is the scene in which Emmi's son kicks in the television (an important symbol in All That Heaven Allows) after finding out that his mother has married an Arab.
Director Todd Haynes made his own homage to both All That Heaven Allows and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul in 2002 with Far From Heaven, which echoes Sirk's films but is tempered with several themes taken from Fassbinder. Haynes discussed these connections explicitly in a video introduction to the Criterion Collection's DVD edition of Ali.
In Xiaolu Guo's novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007) the heroine first meets her lover in a cinema at a showing of Fear Eats the Soul.
[edit] References
- [1] ^ VIVA Lifestyle Portal (German)
[edit] External links
- Ali: Fear Eats the Soul at the Internet Movie Database
- Criterion Collection essay by Chris Fujiwara
- Jim's Reviews overview
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