| Ali: Fear Eats the Soul | |
|---|---|
| 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), Peer Raben (arranger) |
| Release date(s) | 5 March 1974 31 October 1974 |
| Running time | 93 min. |
| Country | West Germany |
| Language | German, Arabic |
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (German: Angst essen Seele auf) (also known in English as Fear Eats the Soul) 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 1974 Cannes Film Festival[1] 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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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 eats soul".
Since Ali's poor German grammar is translated literally in the film's English subtitles, the subtitles for Ali's dialogue are riddled with grammatical errors ("You no make cous-cous?").
Ali (Salem), is 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 Arabic music (Al Asfouryeh by Sabah). A woman in the bar (Katharina Herberg) 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 noxious reaction over their relationship. Gossipy neighbors treat them with contempt, complaining their (already noticeably dilapidated) tenement building has now become filthy. Emmi is shunned by her coworkers, and Ali faces discrimination at every turn. Emmi tells her son-in-law Eugen and daughter Krista (Fassbinder himself and Irm Hermann) that she is in love with Ali; Eugen thinks she is screwy.
The landlord's son arrives to point out that sub-letting is against Emmi's tenancy agreement, Ali must leave within a day, but she claims Ali and herself are planning to marry to alleviate this little difficulty. Later though, Ali thinks this is an excellent idea. 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 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 the prospect of social acceptance. Out of longing for her old friends' respect, Emmi neglects Ali; when they comment on his muscles, she shows him off as if he were an object, as they remark how clean he is. She says he has mood swings, but it must be his "foreigner mentality", adopting the xenophobic attitudes of her friends in order to fit in. Emmi would not cook Ali couscous because she wanted him to eat German food, and generally become more German so they would fit in. He then turns to bartender Barbara (Barbara Valentin), who used to cook for him and begins an affair with her. Emmi grows desperate as their relationship deteriorates and visits him at work, where he pretends he doesn't know her as his workmates make fun of her age. 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. Emmi visits Ali in the hospital, where the doctor tells her the illness is common among migrants because of the stress they face in every day life due to prejudice; the doctor adds that Ali will have surgery to remove the ulcer, but will probably be back in 6 months with another ulcer. Emmi declares that she will do everything in her power to reduce that stress.
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 [1].
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.
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.
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