Left Field Cinema

Meet Ali and Emmi, one the most romantically doomed couple in the history of film. Romeo and Juliet may have had to fight for love past the prejudices that evolved through familial feuding, but Ali and Emmi have a far greater battle on their hands against three separate prejudices, nationality, race and age.

Writer and director Rainer Werner Fassbinder is one of the German mad-house directors of the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s, along with Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders, Fassbinder was known for his on-the-run style, quick turn around and heavy emphasis on semiotics rather than character or plot. Like his fellow countrymen Fassbinder was ridiculously prolific, directing up to five feature films per year. Typically shot within very tight schedules and with a re-occurring group of actors he built up over the years, Fassbinder was consider by many the first amongst equals and this ethos spread to his own productions, explorations of sexuality and sexual power are common place in his body of work and Fear Eats the Soul is no different. Featuring a cast of faces familiar to those who’ve seen his other films and shot at miraculous speed. It comes in the very middle of Fassbinder’s directorial career and represents one of his greatest works, and one his most widely known, with perhaps only The Marriage of Maria Braun surpassing it in that respect.

The plot follows an elderly German lady, Emmi, and Arab man many years her junior, Ali, as they meet one wet night in a bar, they grow fond of one and other, fall in love, marry, and struggle with the pressures of prejudice and hate whilst maintaining their love for one and other. The contrast between love and hate is what lends the film extra weight and raises it above many of Fassbinder’s other works. It is arguably the deepest of contrasts, but when the hate emanates from a source as spurious and superficial as racial prejudice, the contrast has even greater impact. As offensive as bigotry, prejudice, and racism are to normal right thinking human beings, it become doubly offensive in this context because it is the worst of human emotions attacking the best of human emotions. Influenced by Douglas Sirk’s melodrama’s, which also dealt with the toxic cocktail of love and societal constraints, in particular his 1955 film, All that Heavens Allows which followed a similar story through the class divide and it’s 2002 Todd Haynes remake staring Julian Moore which also dealt with the issue of romance across the boundary of race. So we’ve established that it is a common story, but what’s remarkable about Fear Eats the Soul is how it’s still far from dated and can still make for truly challenging viewing after all these years. Now a days a wealthy woman married to a poor man doesn’t even raise an eye brow and a mixed race couple walking in the street means nothing to most people, but an elderly lady with a younger man will still draw attention for some unknown reason, the prejudice of age appears to be the hardest for society to rid itself of. The 1971 film Harold and Maude (which featured an even more drastic age gap between its romantically entangled protagonists) still solicits vocal and negative reactions when shown to audiences, especially teenage audiences and the same is true of Fear Eats the Soul. Emmi and Ali do nothing wrong at the start of their relationship, they are two lost souls who find comfort and solace with one and other. The differences between them mean nothing; they behave like an average couple despite the unaverage make-up of that couple. Interestingly enough, had the genders of Emmi and Ali been reversed, had the story followed and elderly German man and a younger Arab woman and still been set in Germany then the couple probably wouldn’t have had fend off as many attacks against their love. This particular brand of ageism is only enhanced by the gender configuration. What makes this all the more distressing is that 1970’s Germany is far from a Jingoistic society, it’s not too dissimilar to many 1970’s European nations, and yet this sort of bigotry is common place.

Fassbinder’s visual style is fairly cold and detached, often framing his shots through doorways giving his films a voyeuristic feel, and often positioning his characters unnaturally and forcing them to remain static within the frame when movement is expected, or making them move and reposition themselves in unnatural ways; this sort of stylised movement reflects Fassbinder’s background in theatre, often he blocks scenes in a heightened way that reminds of theatre productions rather than film. It is a far from naturalistic approach to the camera and is punctuated with what can only be described as unexpected and unexplained camera movements: his lens often moves from stationary to semi-circling characters rapidly with no obvious trigger or meaning. Despite this detached visual style the film maintains a significant emotional punch because of its leading man and woman. Ali and Emmi are instantly likable, charming and make for compelling viewing. Ali is regularly adorable with fragmented and broken German, Emmi shows resilience to those who judge her by constantly reassuring both herself and Ali that: “they’re just envious”. Which not surprisingly is for the most part completely accurate. The women who give her a hard time secretly wish they had a man a strong, young and good looking as Ali, as a study of racism this is possibly the films most astute of observations. Fear Eats the Soul still has relevance today, Ali’s religious background creates a reflection within contemporary events. It is casually mentioned that Ali found life easier before Munich, of course he’s referring to the Munich Olympic disaster from which it is easy to draw comparisons to 911 (as Speilberg famously did in his 2005 film), the innocent majority of Muslims are victimised for the actions of the minority of extremists, as it happens today in the world it also happened then and for much the same reasons.

The film does run the risk of becoming a lecture on prejudice and although there is a case for films that do make clear arguments in such a way (no one would argue against the didactic value of a film like To Kill a Mocking Bird for example) Fassbinder avoids any potential belittling of his film as a “film lecture” through characterisation. As the plot develops, those around our protagonists begin to have their prejudices eroded by pragmatism and new prejudices. The cleaning ladies Emmi works with for example begin to focus more on a new migrant worker in their midst and worry less about Emmi’s foreign partner, and Emmi’s family begin to realise that they need their mother and what she can provide them with more than they need their hate. So once this adversity has subsided and Emmi and Ali are no longer up against the world their relationship begins to break down, Emmi shows Ali off to her friends and treats him like a trophy boyfriend, and Ali has an affair with an old bar lady flame. Both Emmi and Ali are far from flawless and it seems that the only thing holding their relationship together is their combined and mutual victim hood, once that most spurious of foundations is removed things begin to fall apart. To use a personal anecdote, I was once in a romantic relationship with a woman from India, although we liked each other very much we had little in common on a day to day basis; our relationship might have ended after a few weeks had we not become victims of racism, with Asian men in particular giving my former partner a hard time and staring at us in the street if we held hands (had our gender configuration been reversed then it would doubtlessly been Caucasian men who’d have had the biggest problem with our relationship). Needless to say, the relationship was all the stronger for it because their bigotry gave us something in common, gave us something to unite against, we almost enjoyed our victim hood because it made the relationship feel more important than it really was – but this feeling didn’t last forever. In this sense Fear Eats the Soul is particularly pertinent to my own past, the characters and events resonate more with me because of it.

From a technical stand point the film does have some issues. 1970’s ADR isn’t what it is now, and there are some serious lip sync issues as well as the quality of the recording not matching the rooms the recording is supposed to have taken place in. But the value of good ADR was not as high at this point in cinema’s history, particularly in main land Europe where Italy and Germany stand out a chief offenders for poor dialogue replacement. On the plus side the sound design ingeniously uses the sounds of the exterior world to add a cold and urbanised feel to the film, cars, horns, sirens and shouting pedestrians can be heard at all times outside the flat which Emmi and Ali live in. Also the films soundtrack is gorgeous, the music track which opens the film and lures Emmi into the bar where she first meets Ali is a beautiful track - one of many in this film. Emmi hearing the music and her reaction to it is one of many memorable moments in Fear Eats the Soul, some of these moments are hilarious, intentionally and unintentionally. When Emmi informs her children that she’s married Ali, one of her sons breaks her TV with his foot, but his frustration is added to by the TV refusing to concede and break, Ali’s refusal to sleep with a prostitute because he insists in broken German that “cock broken”. Unintentionally funny is some of the hideously revolting 1970’s German fashion, trousers that redefine the term “tight fit” and top and bottom combinations which defy colour co-ordination. But you do get used to this element of the production which only momentarily proves distraction from what is one of the greatest examinations of prejudice in the history of cinema.

M.Dawson