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Cast: Brigitte Mira (Emmi), El Hedi Ben Salem (Ali)
Directed by: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Release date: August, 1974

In Ali: fear eats the soul, there is always someone watching…and judging. Family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, people on the street, in shops, bars and restaurants. And you have no choice but to conform to what’s ‘proper’ and ‘right’.

If the plot sounds melodramatic, that’s no surprise as Fassbinder was heavily influenced by the 60’s Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk. His movies, reinventing the melodrama genre, were infused with subversive elements, implicating society in their unsparing, incisive criticism of social norms and prejudices.

Emmi works as a cleaning lady in an office for a living. She is old, frumpy-looking. Her children are grown up. They have moved on with their lives and she is no more than a footnote that they don’t even care to glance at in the course of their busy lives. One night on her way back from work, it starts raining. She enters into a bar to take shelter. It’s mostly Arab, Moroccans and Turks there. All of them stop whatever they are doing and turn around to stare at her. The blonde owner cum barmaid dares Ali, a tall, bearded, handsome guy, to dance with her. And he does. He’s a decent man, good enough to be kind to her, talk to her, to offer to walk her back home.

Emmi is lonely. She invites him over for a drink. She ignores the insinuations, when a neighbor picks the very moment she is walking upstairs with her guest to return three bucks. The neighbor runs across the passage to share the fresh gossip with her friend. They discuss that she is not a German anyway, what with that kind of name and all. Her husband was Polish after all.

They connect sharing small talk, assuaging their solitude with each other’s company. Ali lives at the other end of town. Emmi asks him to stay the night and sets up a bed for him along with her husband’s pajamas. Ali walks across to her room at night and they wake up in the morning in the same bed.

Ali becomes a regular visitor. When the landlord’s son comes in a response to neighbor’s complaints, to tell her that she can’t sublet, she tells him that she is going to marry Ali. Ali takes it seriously and before long they are married. And this is where begins the agony and the ecstasy.

Emmi invites her family over to inform them and to share her joy. One of her sons smashes the TV set in a fit of rage. They all walk out ashamed of the ‘disgrace’ she has brought upon them by marrying a ‘black’ foreigner, that too at this age. Her neighbors and co-workers stop talking to her. They keep watch of everything she does but pretend to ignore her. Her regular shopkeeper insults Ali and refuses to serve them anymore.

Initially Emmi tries to look past the ostracism, saying they are all jealous of her good fortune. But in an unforgettable scene, where she is sitting with Ali in a restaurant in a sea of yellow chairs, she finally breaks down. She yells out that she can’t take the hate anymore. The camera slowly zooms out in a tracking shot, to show the restaurant employees, all standing at the door, looking at her and Ali. They go on a vacation. When they get back, they unexpectedly find themselves accepted back into society. A neighbor needs Ali’s help to move some heavy stuff. Emmi’s son, who broke the TV set, wants her to baby-sit his child.

But these external forces intrude upon and threaten to damage the delicate relationship between Ali and Emmi. Emmi’s co-workers suddenly find Ali handsome. She exhibits pride when they say that ‘Ali is clean unlike most foreigners’ and want to feel his muscles. Ali drifts back towards the barmaid and starts going to her house to have couscous and sleeps with her. The movie ends with the two of them trying to reach out across the divide and salvage their marriage.

This movie is tender in its observation of the love between Emmi and the much younger Ali. Ali’s far away from home, trying to stake out a living in an alien land, where people hate him and his ilk. And Emmi provides him companionship. But the movie is also merciless in its depiction of its flawed characters. Emmi joins her co-workers in impressing it upon a new worker from Yugoslavia, that she’s not welcome as she’s an outsider.

The invisible boundaries are highlighted and underlined, when the camera shoots through doors and other such restricted angles that the characters seem contained and constrained within the physical frame. The lines between victim and victimizer are blurred. Finally who’s responsible? No one and everyone. As Ali says, “Fear eats the soul”. And that’s something which is proven true for all, including us, the audience.