Title: Ali: Fear Eats The Soul
Rating: 5 Stars
Another entry in the BFI Sight and Sounds list of best films, once again not only did I not know anything about it but I’d never even heard of it. In my ignorance, I figured that it’d be a film about the struggles of Middle Eastern living.
I wasn’t even close. It’s a German film made in 1974. It’s the story of two lonely people. Emmi is a sixty year old office cleaner. She has been widowed for many years and her children have long since moved out and are living their lives. She lives alone in her apartment. At her age with nothing but a lifetime of work in her past and no sign of ever stopping, she is living an invisible, isolated life.
Ali is a different story. First of all, his name isn’t even Ali. Not willing to go to the trouble of learning their names, it’s just what all Germans call all Arabs. His real name is El Hedi ben Salem. This is also the name of the actor portraying him. Ali is a young man from Morocco. With no employment opportunities in Morocco, the only job available to him in Germany is an auto mechanic. He lives in a tiny apartment with many other Arabs. Alienated by German culture and the German people who are openly contemptuous of him, he is miserable.
One night, in a pounding rain, Emmi stops at a local bar that she’s never been in before. Unbeknownst to her, it’s a bar that caters to Arabs. Goaded by his friends, Ali joins Emmi at her table and they begin an awkward conversation. Despite that strange beginning, their cultural differences, and their age difference, their shared feelings of loneliness creates a spark between the two.
Ali insists upon walking Emmi home. To show her appreciation, she invites him upstairs. When she learns that, at his apartment, he has to share his bed with other men, she insists that he sleeps in her spare bedroom. One thing leads to another and they end up sharing a bed.
The next morning and the succeeding mornings, the other German ladies are scandalized to see a brown skinned man emerging from Emmi’s apartment. Their tongues immediately start wagging and they insinuate that she must not be a real German (she has a Polish surname because she married a Polish laborer during the War).
Their complaint reaches the ear of the building owner. Assuming that she must be subletting to Ali, he tells Emmi that Ali must leave. To prevent that, Emmi lies and tells him that she and Ali are going to get married. After the landlord leaves, Ali suggests that they should get married.
After the marriage, they are immediately ostracized. The ladies at her apartment building refuse to talk to her. Her fellow cleaners, once they find out that she married a brown person, refuse to include her in their breaks. Her family disowns her and storms away. Her local grocer refuses to serve Ali. Even simply sitting and drinking coffee at a cafe earns them dirty, suspicious looks.
Eventually, when people start realizing how important the quiet Emmi is, they begin to relent. A family member needs Emmi to babysit. The grocer wants to recover Emmi’s business. Even the people at the apartment look more kindly on Emmi when she relinquishes some of her storage space to them.
The pressure begins to get to them. Emmi begins to make insulting remarks about Ali’s ethnicity. When in the company of some of his fellow mechanics, Ali refuses to acknowledge Emmi.
By the end of the film, they’ve realized that, even though their relationship is unconventional and imperfect, they are happier together than apart. Emmi resolves to do everything in her power to make Germany more welcoming to Ali.
Emmi and Ali are both characters that you develop strong feelings for. They are both gentle, lonely souls that understand how lucky they are that they’ve found each other. Their loneliness trumps the differences in their ethnicity and age. It really is a touching love story.
As an American, it’s interesting to see issues like racism play out in other countries. Being immersed in our country’s culture, it’s easy to think that somehow our problems are uniquely ours. Racism exists everywhere where different groups of people congregate. Especially considering Germany’s twentieth century history, it should not exactly be surprising that Germans of a certain age will have racist tendencies. It’s just jarring to me to hear people speaking in German complaining about how dirty and lazy brown skinned people are. Such unthinking hatred does seem to be a universal human condition.
In researching the film, I learned that the actor playing Ali led a somewhat checkered life. Married in Morocco with five children, he left them to go to Europe. In 1971, he met Rainier Werner Fassbinder, the man that later directed this film. Meeting him in a bathhouse, they commenced a gay relationship. By 1974, after the film was completed, Salem’s violence and drinking became too much for Fassbinder and he ended the relationship. Salem later stabbed three people (none of whom died) and was smuggled out of Germany to France. By 1977, he was arrested and imprisoned. While in prison, he hung himself.
Fassbinder life’s was not much calmer. His friends kept Salem’s death from him for years. He died at the age of 37 due to a combination of cocaine and barbiturates. On the one hand, that seems tragically young for such a talented film maker. However, in the fifteen years before his death, he somehow managed to complete 40 feature films, 24 plays, two television serials, three short films, and four video productions. I’m not sure how that’s even possible.
This film kind of restored my faith in the BFI list. This was a film that I’d never heard of, and even if I had, I would have felt zero motivation to watch it. However, it was a beautifully told tale of two lonely, ostracized people finding love in the most unlikely of situations.
dorkenstein 