Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

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Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (German: Angst Essen Seele Auf) is a 1974 German film directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It stars Brigitte Mira as Emmi Kurowski and El Hedi ben Salem as Ali. The director won 2 awards at the Cannes Film Festival and Mira received a German Film Award.

[Spoiler warningSpoiler warning]: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The story concerns Ali, a young Arab Gastarbeiter, and Emmi, a widowed washwoman. They meet when Emmi ducks inside a bar, driven by the rain and drawn by the exotic music. The German bartender suggests Ali ask the woman to dance, and she accepts. They then fall in love. Emmi's family and coworkers are unsupportive of her decision, and reject Emmi. When Emmi and Ali return from vacation, Emmi's community have moved on to new scandals, but without external stress on their relationship, Emmi and Ali need to reconsider the terms of their relationship.

Trivia

The original film title "Angst essen Seele auf" – is grammatically incorrect German, and means "Fear eat up soul".

The film was shot in just nearly two weeks, and was planned as an exercise in film-making for Fassbinder, to fill in the time in his schedule between the work on two other films "Martha" and "Effi Briest" ^[#endnote_1].

Ali is played by Fassbinder's partner at the time – El Hedi ben Salem. Ben Salem committed suicide in a jail several years later. Barbara is played by an Austrian actress Barbara Valentin, who was in the 1980s a partner of Freddie Mercury - a singer of the band Queen.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder himself did a cameo appearance as Emmi's son in law.

The film is in part an homage to the films of Douglas Sirk, particularly Imitation of Life and All That Heaven Allows. The most overt homage being the scene in which Emmi's son kicks in the television (a potent and powerful symbol in All That Heaven Allows) after finding out that his mother has married an Arab.

Director Todd Haynes made his own homage to both All That Heaven Allows and in 2002 with Far From Heaven, a remake of Sirk's film tempered with several themes taken from Fassbinder. Haynes made these connections explicit later in a video introduction to the Criterion Collection's dvd edition of .

References

[1] ↑ [VIVA Lifestyle Portal] ()

External links

[Chris Fujiwara essay at criterionco.com]

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