#52 Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder) at BAMPFA
Another one of my favorite discoveries from this project, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) is a story about the unlikely love that develops between two lonely people and the society that refuses to accept their relationship.
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the film follows Emmi, a widowed cleaning woman in her sixties, and Ali, a Moroccan migrant worker more than twenty years her junior. Their meeting is almost accidental: Emmi takes refuge from the rain in a bar frequented by immigrant laborers, where Ali is jokingly dared to ask her to dance. What begins as a polite conversation gradually becomes something deeper. Both are isolated in different ways: Emmi by age and loneliness, Ali by xenophobia and his status as a Gastarbeiter (guest worker). In each other they find companionship and comfort.
But their happiness is fragile. When they marry, their relationship becomes a scandal among neighbors, friends, and coworkers. Emmi’s own adult children disown her. People stare at them in public, refuse them service, gossip about them behind their backs, and treat their love as something unnatural.
Set in West Germany in the 1970s, the film works as a critique of a society that believed it had moved past the hatred that defined the Nazi era. The country was rebuilding and presenting itself as modern and progressive, yet Fassbinder reveals how little has actually changed beneath the surface. The racism directed at Ali, along with the contempt people show toward Emmi for loving him, suggests that the structures of exclusion and suspicion remain deeply ingrained. Emmi’s frequent offhand references to Hitler and the Nazi Party hint at how present that past still is in everyday life. By the end of the film, Emmi also reveals that she carries some of the same assumptions as the people around her. She objectifies Ali’s body in front of her friends, dismisses his frustration as a “foreign mentality,” and tells him he should “get used to the way things are done in Germany,” showing how deeply these attitudes remain embedded even in someone capable of love and empathy.
Fassbinder shot the film in just about two weeks on a shoestring budget. Despite its rapid production, it became his most critically acclaimed work and a defining film of the New German Cinema movement. More than fifty years later, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul still feels painfully relevant. It’s a sharp portrait of how society treats outsiders and how hard it can be to love someone when everyone around you disapproves.