The pivotal scene of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul occurs with the two main characters seated outside, their figures almost lost amidst a sea of bright yellow patio chairs. Their hands are intertwined, and tears run down the woman's face as she says to the man: "Sometimes I wish I were all alone with you in the world, with nobody around us." And they are almost alone, isolated by the yellow chairs, but even here they cannot escape the cruel gaze of onlookers, who stare at them contemptuously from across the courtyard. But despite this onslaught of societal disapproval, they declare their love for each other, and the scene ends with the woman deciding that they need to leave for awhile. She promises him that when they return, it will be better. That perhaps people will be nice to them.
The woman is Emmi, a middle aged German who cleans floors for a living. The man is her husband, a Moroccan immigrant who works as a mechanic. He is called Ali, not because it is his name, but because in Germany, all Arabs are called Ali. They are also called much worse things. So when Emmi invites Ali home one night after dancing with him at a bar, and they develop an affection for each other that leads to marriage, their world reacts with almost universal scorn. They try to stay afloat amidst this tide of disapproval, but their love does not go unchallenged. Fassbinder creates a minimalist microcosm of racial intolerance and societal injustice by mapping it onto fairly standard melodramatic tropes. The plot itself is taken from the Douglas Sirk film All that Heaven Allows, wherein a widowed Jane Wyman falls in love with a much younger Rock Hudson, only to meet with the disapproval of her friends and family. Sirk's film is melodrama at its finest, where pretty exteriors and calculated mise en scene mask the deep cut of societal scorn.
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul has calculated mise en scene as well: Fassbinder's characters are perfectly groomed, as Emmi wears heels and patterned dresses to clean floors and Ali wears sharp grey suits to go to seedy bars. Their world is insular, with only a handful of tertiary characters that, despite appearing regularly, seem to blend into a single person with a single expression. And these bit players are constantly separated from Emmi and Ali: by staircases, by window grates, by an opened door. This visual scheme serves to isolate the central couple, but it also acts as an indictment of the herd mentality that leads to blatant and unchecked racism.
The title comes from Ali's broken German. When Emmi expresses her mixed emotions at the very beginning of their relationship, he tells her that "fear eat the soul." Ali's linguistic difficulties preclude him from making any melodramatic speeches: he expresses how much he loves Emmi with the span of his arms, and his ability to flatter her never moves beyond such trite adjectives as "good," and "nice." But his sayings have a broken, aphoristic quality that suggest a sort of innocence, and which force the viewer to remember that it is not merely Emmi that is bearing the brunt of societal disapproval. Though she expresses her fears through tears and he expresses his with taciturn naivety, they are both affected by their situation. But the titular fear, the gnawing, soul-crushing fear that the film is exploring is not really their fear: it is the fear that they elicit. It is the fear that every other character in the film has when they catch a glimpse of the Emmi and Ali walking hand in hand; a fear that all too quickly turns to hate. So while Emmi hopes to find a "little piece of heaven," the rest of the world will never quite let this happen. Because even if society begins to accept Emmi and Ali, a piece of heaven is more than this world allows.
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