Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

Here’s a way to pick your friends: ask them, ​‘What do you think of Rain­er Wern­er Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul?’ If they respond in the neg­a­tive, sim­ply thank them for their time, then turn and walk away. (An option­al slap could eas­i­ly be admin­is­tered between the thank­ing and the walking.)

As one of the filmmaker’s most beloved works, there is sim­ply no excuse for antipa­thy. It is a remake and recon­tex­tu­al­i­sa­tion of Dou­glas Sirk’s 1955 melo­dra­ma, All That Heav­en Allows, a film which saw an afflu­ent house­wife played by Jane Wyman suc­cumb to social exclu­sion for insti­gat­ing an affair with her book­ish gar­den­er (Rock Hud­son). Here, Wyman’s char­ac­ter is now a dumpy wid­ow­er and one-time Nazi con­spir­a­tor, Emmi (Brigitte Mira), and Hud­son a strap­ping, alien­at­ed Moroc­can immi­grant called Ali (El Hedi ben Salem).

The first 10 min­utes are sim­ply stag­ger­ing: the cred­i­bil­i­ty of the machi­na­tions that play out, the bold roman­ti­cism of the fram­ing and light­ing, the sub­tle poet­i­cism of the dia­logue all astound in their can­dour and elo­quence. Every­thing about the film looks straight­for­ward, but it’s only by the time you reach the final frames that you begin to com­pre­hend the all-encom­pass­ing mas­tery on show.

The film offers a cri­tique of a Ger­many still sim­per­ing in the long shad­ow cast by the Third Reich, with Emmi and Ali’s part­ner­ship (and lat­er mar­riage) hold­ing up a mir­ror to the racism and arro­gance which still reigns free. Typ­i­cal­ly, the only way work­ing class peo­ple can be made to hold their tongues is when mon­ey (or self-inter­est) is involved, and, strange­ly, the one per­son sym­pa­thet­ic to this off-kil­ter cou­pling is Emmi’s land­lord. But this bare­ly scratch­es the sur­face of the film’s bound­less riches.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul screens as part of a full Fass­binder ret­ro­spec­tive (includ­ing all his rare TV work) at London’s BFI South­bank. For more info vis­it bfi​.org​.uk