Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Starring Brigitte Mira and El Hedi ben Salem.

In a Nutshell: A lonely widow is ostracized when she falls in love with a younger Arab.

Fassbinder conceived Ali: Fear Eats the Soul as a directing exercise in between two other projects. This hardly telegraphs a labor of love. But his speedy production schedule must have granted an unfettered simplicity to the film’s unlikely love affair. The story is a thematic reworking of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, supplemented with two like characters from his early work The American Solider (a far grimmer tale about discrimination). But Fassbinder presents this tale without irony, projecting Sirk’s subtext to boot. The end result is a beautiful love story between two flawed individuals aching for acceptance.

The film's greatest achievement can be felt through the soulful performances of the resilient Brigitte Mira and sad-eyed El Hedi ben Salem. Today, ben Salem’s work carries a haunting truth. As Fassbinder’s real-life lover, the hostility he found in Germany built up until he stabbed three men, then hung himself in prison. As “Ali,” he faces victimization, even Mira’s unconscious prejudice, exhausting him to the point of emotional detachment. Mira’s Emmi faces the same tough decision of defying her family and peers for Ali’s love, and Fassbinder is careful not to define her plight as social martyrdom. Their conflict within themselves could reflect Fassbinder’s own struggle to find happiness, the unfortunate causality of human nature. Though the film’s end champions its progression as well.

Select shots of visual artifice present still moments of separation or proximity. Such shots adopt any number of manners; evocation of Emmi and Ali’s love frozen in time or the overt manipulation each character feels within their given “role”. Or it may just be Fassbinder’s extreme depiction of his own experiences. It may feel unnatural, but not inappropriate. Much like its title, these shots express a blunt simplicity akin to the couple’s union. Fassbinder has crafted a moving love story, but even its original intent demonstrates his command. Cribbing from Sirk forecasts lazy movie making. But Fassbinder’s personal melancholy illustrates the story’s backbone, uncovering depths of humanity that would have been strangled by Sirk’s feverish melodrama. Only something as ineffable as Emmi and Ali’s love deserves his simple honesty.