Classic Review: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

Ali Fear Eats the Soul is a film that superficially appears to be an unsubtle romantic melodrama in which two innocent, impossibly sweet souls find happiness in an intolerant society. All of the elements of a traditional tragedy would seem to be here. Our protagonist is a short, wide eyed older woman who is dwarfed by her loud, overbearing son-in-law. Her husband is a foreigner who struggles with the German language and frequently has to deal with blatantly racist attacks. They seem to be clichéd characters with very little depth, who exist in the sort of black and white world that only exists in the movies. The dialogue is so obvious and artificial in some ways, that it obfuscates some of the more disturbing and outrageous things that the characters say and do. When you key into these aspects of the story, it becomes a far richer, intellectually challenging film. 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was clearly drawing from Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows when he put together the concept for this film. Sirk’s film was about a rich suburban widow who finds herself falling for a much young gardener who has adopted progressive ideals. This relationship is threatened by her family members and the expectations that were placed on older women in 1950s suburban America. Sirk’s film cleverly managed to point out a lot of the ways in which Cary’s seemingly perfect world was constricting and painful to live in. He used cinematography and framing to make Cary’s house look like a gilded cage. Working within the melodrama genre, which often extolled the virtues of a traditional, ‘family values’ centred life, he was able to point out the absurdities of the restrictions placed on ordinary women. 

Fassbinder’s approach is similar in many ways. For Ali Fear Eats the Soul, he still uses the setup of having an older woman, Emmi Kurowski (Mira), fall in love with a younger man, Ali (ben Salem), but he makes a few crucial changes. This isn’t simply an homage to Sirk’s subversive 1950s films, it’s an effort to repurpose them and tell a similar story through a very different perspective. 

Instead of being a rich, suburban housewife, Emmi is a cleaner who already faces judgment from her peers for having been married to a Polish man. She is also a woman who actively perpetrates a lot of the behaviour that makes her relationship with Ali so difficult. He is a victim of racist discrimination at the hands of the women living in her apartment building but she is happy to join her fellow washerwoman in excluding their Yugoslavian colleague from discussions about getting their wages raised. Like the other Germans in her orbit, she has prejudices and gets a sick satisfaction out of excluding non-Germans from her social circle. She is never presented as an introspective creature and she is unable to fully interrogate her own racism or the hypocrisy that she displays in hurting others in the way that her husband has been hurt. Fassbinder never directly asks us to take a position on Emmi’s racist behaviour and he never explicitly condemns her for the actions she takes. The sentimental score and the way that she is shot, distracts us from the cruelty that she often displays. 

We are more shocked when we hear Emmi expressing childlike admiration for Adolf Hitler. It is incredibly disturbing to hear her inane musings about his greatness, while seeing her shot like some sort of vulnerable, fragile creature. Fassbinder brings out the soft focus lens and has Mira lie down in a position that highlights her birdlike frame. We are torn because Fassbinder has presented us with moments of utter sweetness before this. When she and Ali embrace the night after they slept together for the first time, it is genuinely touching. Viewers relate to her as she worries about being discarded by him or chastised for sleeping with him.

When we start to see the darkness that lurks behind Emmi’s doe eyes, we see how racism and other prejudices can take many different forms. The other prejudiced individuals in the film are all painted as the sort of over the top caricatures that might have appeared in a 1950s film. They all appear in an unflattering light, scowl a lot and grumble all of their lines. Their obvious intolerance allows us to ignore the fact that Emmi is just as bad as them in many ways. She is a sympathetic, loveable character in many ways and that makes it all the more difficult to come to terms with her casual racism and support of a hateful Nazi ideology. Ali Fear Eats the Soul is more honest depiction of racism than we often get in cinema and it is refreshing to be left squirming as we see how infectious this behaviour can be. 

In changing the power dynamic between the two main characters, Fassbinder also adds complexity to the male protagonist. Ali is beholden to his wife in many ways and when she starts to feel more secure in her social position, she begins to treat her husband poorly. She is kind and generous towards him when everybody around them opposes their relationship and treats them in an equally unkind manner. When the tide turns and her family members, friends and acquaintances decide to treat them decently, because they want something out of them, she starts to feel superior to him. She lets her friends paw him like he’s a piece of meat and appears to value their approval above all else. He has an affair with another woman but it is seen as a desperate, sad act. Fassbinder avoids spelling out all of this to us and, again, we find ourselves questioning Emmi’s motivations. 

With Ali Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder should be commended for the changes he made to what could have been a traditional fable, but his genius is also apparent in so many of the directorial choices that he made. When Emmi and Ali are together, he aims for a naturalistic approach and the actors are allowed to move around in a loose fashion and deliver their dialogue in an understated manner. Even when they begin to fight, we still feel as though viewers are seeing something realistic and honest. This is contrasted with the staged quality of the scenes involving outside forces. Emmi’s family members will be grouped together as though they are posing for a school photograph and they leer at Ali in a mechanical fashion. The actors speak their lines in a heightened, almost theatrical tone and they all represent ideas rather than feeling like real people. It’s an effective way to highlight how Ali and Emmi look at the world and it drives home so many of the messages that Fassbinder has to impart. 

In the end, Ali Fear Eats the Soul is a beautiful piece of work that is apparently more accessible than other works produced by Fassbinder. It is deserving of its stellar reputation. 

still courtesy of TIFF

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Zita Short

I am passionate about screwball comedies from the 1930s and certain actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood. I’ll aim to review new Netflix releases and write features, so expect a lot of romantic comedies and cult favourites.