Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

The first shots are a clash between them and us. An elderly woman, ugly and shapeless, walks into an unfamiliar bar and takes the only table by the door. The barmaid, insolent with a blond wig showing through her own thinning hair, saunters over. The woman orders a Coke. At the bar, a group of customers turns to stare at her exaggerated by the camera’s sense of distance from them while the blond tauntingly dares one of her customers to ask the woman to dance. He does; now they’re grouped together on the dingy dance floor while others look on.

“Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” (1974) is about these two people. Emmi Kurowski (Brigitte Mira) is about 60, widowed but working two shifts as a building cleaner because she has nothing else to do; her children avoid her. Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) is about 40, works in a garage somewhere but spends most of his time drinking beer with friends in his room or theirs; “Always work, always drunk,” he says simply if that’s what he actually says; it may be just one more thing Fassbinder throws up there for us to consider suspecting as we try to piece together this man’s life. His name isn’t even Ali (it’s not clear that he has any papers proving who he is); it’s just what Germans call dark-skinned foreigners like him.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder told their story in this brief film of 15 days’ shooting in 1974 between “Martha” and “Effi Briest.” Shot on a shoestring budget; Mira was then best known as part of Fassbinder’s regular ensemble cast but had never carried a film before; Salem had appeared only in bit parts before playing Fassbinder’s lover in “Effi Briest”; inspired by Douglas Sirk’s 1955 “All That Heaven Allows,” with Jane Wyman as the older woman who falls for her young gardener (Rock Hudson).

Fassbinder said he made it just to fill time between bigger films, but “Ali” may be the best of his 40 or so features; it’s certainly in the top three with “The Marriage of Maria Braun” and “Merchant of Four Seasons.”

The film is very simple, very powerful. It’s a melodrama, but Fassbinder leaves out all the highs and lows and keeps only the middle the quiet desperation. The two characters are separated by race and age, but they share one thing: They like each other; they care about each other; in a world that otherwise feels cold and indifferent to them both. When Emmi confesses shyly to being a building cleaner many people look down on her for that Ali, whose German is limited (to put it mildly), expresses things more directly: “German master, Arab dog.”

Sexual exploitation was always a Fassbinder theme; here there is something else. The tall Moroccan offers to walk the cleaning woman home. It’s raining, so she invites him in for coffee. He has to take a long tram ride out to his district; she asks him if he wants to stay over. He can’t sleep wants to talk. She tells him to sit on her bed. For years I never noticed exactly when he takes her hand, begins caressing her arm.

Of course, she is studying herself in the mirror next morning. She knows she’s old and lined. We understand a little about the world she lives in when we hear her fellow cleaners’ casual racist conversations as they complain about how dirty all the foreign workers are. Emmi’s defense is indirect: “But they work! That’s what they’re here for.” Germans don’t like their foreign workers but still don’t want to collect their own garbage or dig their own ditches.

Just by being together, Emmi and Ali offend everyone who sees them. Fassbinder shows us scenes of Emmi’s neighbors gossiping spitefully; the grocer across the street being deliberately rude to Ali; a waiter being aloof in a restaurant (“Hitler’s favorite restaurant!” Emmi tells Ali); guests in a cafe mocking them.

The most unforgettable scene comes when Emmi tells her children that she has gotten married. Using a zoom lens to flatten the shot, as if its subjects are sandwiched between microscope slides, Fassbinder pans across the faces of her two sons, her daughter and her son in law (played by himself). Then her son Bruno whirls around in his chair, stands up and kicks in the screen of her TV set.

The movie’s best scenes come after this one. Alone with each other, Ali and Emmi are content but they live in a toxic society. Soon Emmi is ganging up with her fellow workers to exclude the new cleaner “from Yugoslavia,” says one of them snidely while Croatian music plays on the radio in the background of every scene at home (emphasizing that it was once Yugoslavia).

Soon her disapproving neighbors are happy to have help from Emmi’s strong new husband shifting furniture downstairs; he even gives one of them money for his efforts before lighting his cigarette with his gas lighter while looking disdainfully at his broken wooden one. Soon the co-workers are admiring Ali, and Emmi is letting them feel his muscles at a Christmas party where they drink Jägermeister and sing along to “White Christmas” before he gets up and walks out on her while she’s still singing, leaving her alone with herself.

Soon Ali is back in the bar with his “Arab mates,” drinking boiled red wine (“Would you like it hot or cold?” asks the bartender “Hot!” responds Ali) before going upstairs with the buxom blond; she knows how to make couscous.

Fassbinder was himself an outsider. His father died when he was young, his mother used the movie theater as a baby-sitter, he was gay when that was not acceptable, he was short and unattractive. It is not much of a stretch to see “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” as the story of his own love affair with El Hedi ben Salem (the tall handsome Moroccan actor from whom Fassbinder contracted AIDS after working together in Germany). And it’s not difficult to see self-criticism in the way he has Emmi unthinkingly reflect her society’s prejudices against foreigners.

But the movie cuts its politics with irony. Emmi Kurowski’s first husband was actually a Polish worker in Germany; when they see her walking down the street arm in arm with a Moroccan man, their neighbors sniff, “She’s not a real German with that name.”

Likewise, although the grocer and his daughter initially snub Ali because they’re afraid of losing business from racist customers who might be unhappy about him being there all day every day talking loudly on his cell phone while making no attempt whatsoever at conversation (except once asking for 10 cigarettes), they soon realize they need his money after all and flatter Emmi into coming back to shop there more frequently so that Bruno can give them a free TV set (which he smashes) before turning up every afternoon after work to ask his mother if she can baby sit for him. And finally, Ali’s infidelity with the barmaid is more sad than passionate: He is homesick for couscous, and she cooks it for him, but when they go to bed together he lies unmoving in her arms while she sobs softly into his back.

Fassbinder’s film is called Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Ali tells Emmi. That’s what it’s doing to him, he says eating his soul. The ending of the movie, sudden and melodramatic as life itself, represents for the viewer only part of the unbearable tension Ali feels as a stranger in an alien land. But there’s a solution, here suggested by Emmi: “When we’re together, we have to be nice to each other.”

Sometimes Fassbinder uses deliberately mannered visuals to make a point. He often isolates Emmi and Ali with alternating long shots: First they are distant, then those who stare at them are distant. He packs them into cramped two-shots in claustrophobic little rooms. He exploits the Moroccan’s natural stiffness before the camera. When Emmi enters the bar toward the end and requests “that gypsy song” she and Ali first danced to, it acts as his cue; he rises from his seat so mechanically that he seems like a robot inflamed by music.

Should he be more natural? No, because throughout this movie Fassbinder has directed his actors according to movements and decisions dictated by their world.

At its very end there is dialogue about foreign workers’ condition in Germany not a “message,” but an observation on reality. Few months after Fassbinder died (in 1982, at 37; drugs), I served on the Montreal Film Festival jury with Daniel Schmid, Swiss German director who knew Fassbinder well; he told me rest of story about El Hedi ben Salem.

He came from mountains North Africa, drifted into Germany. “It was strange world for him,” Schmid said[.] “He started drinking, tension grew, and one day he went someplace in Berlin and stabbed three people[.] Then he came back to Rainer and said, ‘Now you don’t have to be afraid anymore.’ He hanged himself in jail.”

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul may sound like melodramatic soap opera; it never plays that way. I believe reason why this movie gains so much power lies in Fassbinder’s full understanding of title and his having been allowed only truth by time.

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