We're all "dirty foreigners" to somebody: A review of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.
Finally saw Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974; German title: Angst essen Seele auf, although the movie itself gives a different preliminary title than "Ali:" Das Glück ist nicht immer lustig ["Happiness Is Not Always Fun"], a line which was spoken in Fassbinder's The American Soldier during the course of relating the plot of Ali), written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. This is a relatively understated (for Fassbinder) story of culture clash framed as an oddball August-November romance (as opposed to a May-December romance), tweaked from a Douglas Sirk movie, All That Heaven Allows (1955, with Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson): a widowed cleaning woman, Emmi Kurowski (Brigitte Mira), falls in love with an equally lonely Gastarbeiter (guest worker) from Morocco, El Hedi ben Salem M'Barek Mohammed Mustapha (El Hedi ben Salem), who goes by the name of Ali (he saw the futility of correcting people who addressed him as "Ali," and so gave up his true name for the sake of getting along); they marry, and find themselves both the victims and perpetrators of unthinking bigotry. That's it, but it is far from boring. The film potters along to a non-ending which comes as an unexpected relief: one can infer enough from the proceedings to conclude that Emmi and Ali's romance will not be one that beats the odds, and only the morbidly curious or sadistic should feel a burning need to see exactly how their love boat will founder and sink.
I'd heard/read about the prejudicial elements of A:FEtS as far as the (West) Germans frowning upon the (mostly) dusky-hued foreigners whom they'd encouraged to temporarily come to the BDR and fuel their country's "economic miracle" in the 1960s and 1970s, but I was pleasantly surprised by the "white-on-white" prejudices on display here. For example, not only do the concierge Frau Karges (Elma Karlowa) and her equally nosy and judgmental friend Frau Ellis (Anita Bucher) frown on Emmi's liaison with Ali from the first, but they also disapprove of Emmi herself: Frau Ellis remarks, "But she's not really German herself, with a name like Kurowski!" (As Emmi tells Ali, she married a Polish guest worker during the war, and he stayed on afterwards rather than return to his country now that it was dominated by the Soviets; Emmi's nationality -- the extent and "authenticity" of her "Germanness" -- are ambiguous only because of her married surname.) And while Emmi's co-workers shun her once they learn of her marriage, Emmi later gratefully participates in the ostracization of a new co-worker from Herzegovina, Yolanda (Helga Ballhaus), who superficially at least presents a "German" front (she's blonde). Emmi drives Ali into the arms of another woman -- the owner of the bar where they met, Barbara (Barbara Valentin) -- in part because she refuses to make him couscous, claiming that she doesn't like it and that he needs to learn to eat German food; subsequently, she treats Ali like a slave, pandering to the salacious curiosity of two of her co-workers, Hedwig (Margit Symo) and Paula (Gusti Kreissl): she tells them, without irony, that he takes a shower every day, and enjoins them to feel his muscles. (Paula's marveling over Ali's "soft skin" is particularly egregious, given that she was the co-worker most given to rants against foreigners, particularly Turkish and Arabic ones, declaring that she would "die of shame" if she ever had an affair with one, much less married one.)
Ali is shown getting back a little of his own from Emmi towards the end, when she seeks him out at his job to beg him to come home -- he's an auto mechanic -- and his co-workers ask him if she's his grandmother from Morocco; Ali joins in in their doltish laughter. Frustratingly, Fassbinder doesn't show Ali on his own with his Gastarbeiter buddies, so we never get a sense of their response to his unexpected marriage, or how he fits in with them. Since Ali tells Emmi that he is Berber, not Arab, one suspects that Ali has no more than superficial friendships within the Arab community in West Germany, and that most of his buddies are in fact Berber as well. (Even if Ali were an Arab, this would not recommend him to the Turkish community, as there was and is much mutual antipathy between Turks and Arabs.)
Also notable is the bigotry displayed by one of the bar girls, who is quite possibly a prostitute (Katharina Herberg): she's the brunette who, after being turned down by Ali with a simple, effective "Schwanz kaputt" ("Cock broken"), taunts him into dancing with Emmi at the beginning of the movie. Though she herself clearly enjoys her liaisons with Ali and his buddies, whether or not she's paid for them, news of Emmi's marriage to Ali arouses her to a vituperative fury -- she spits at the thought -- and one gets the sense that this fury arises only partly from sexual and/or economic jealousy. (The cold shoulder that Barbara, the blonde bar owner who maintains her semi-regular affair with Ali, gives Emmi is more ambiguous: her liking for Ali appears to be more genuine than that of the nameless bar girl's in that she seems more interested in him than she -- or, ultimately, Emmi -- is.)
Hitler's shadow is a palpable presence in A:FEtS: Emmi tells Ali that her father hated all foreigners, and that he was a member of the Nazi party (as was she, and "nearly everybody"); her father loathed Emmi's Polish husband. Newly married, Emmi and Ali go to a fancy restaurant that used to be one of Der Führer's favorites, because she has always wanted to go there; however, Emmi herself is shown to be terribly out of her depth. (I was amused to learn that the German equivalent of "rare" in reference to the type of grilling given to beef is "englisch;" this "rare" is described as being "nearly raw" by the imposing waiter.) Frau Karges and Frau Ellis serve as a kind of Greek chorus for the Nazi point of view; their disappointment and disgust with the long-haired policemen who answer their complaint about the small party that Emmi and Ali give his buddies all but trumpets their political and cultural affiliations. (In a neat fillip, it is the film's authority figures -- the policemen and the landlord's son -- who are the most sympathetic to and accepting of Emmi and Ali.)
I stumbled across a surprising bit of prejudice in my Cassell's German Dictionary (revised and reset, 1978; 4th printing, 1981): when Emmi first invites Ali up for coffee, Frau Karges tells Frau Ellis that Emmi has a foreigner, a "black man" ("ein Schwarzen") in her apartment, which prompts Frau Ellis to ask, "Real black?" (ostensibly "Neger;" this is a masculine-gendered noun, BTW, but the definite article is not pronounced in the movie; as to why I say "ostensibly," see below); Frau Karges reluctantly allows, "Well, not that black, but pretty dark." Cassell's translates "der Neger" as "Negro;" however, when you look at the English side of the dictionary, you find an entry for "nigger," which they translate as either "der Neger" or "der Schwarze(r)." The English entry for "negress" ("negro" is listed within the entry for "negress") refers you to the German "die Negerin" and "der Neger," respectively. The German entry for "Schwarze(r)" does not give an English translation of "nigger," only of "black ((wo)man)," "Negro (Negress);" however, the English entry for "nigger" does give two German equivalents for the expression "nigger in the woodpile" ("der wirkliche Grund" or " der Hase im Pfeffer," if you're interested). I could swear that Frau Ellis says "nigger," not "Neger," since it sounds like the English "nigger" and not like the German "Neger" (which is pronounced "NAY-ger"); I don't know if she was supposed to have a southern accent (the movie is set in Munich) or if she was using a borrowed word. (And if Cassell's was judicious enough to not give this particular racial epithet in the German section, why oh why did they provide it in the English section?)
Subsequently learning that El Hedi ben Salem was one of Fassbinder's lovers in the early 1970s (something that could've been surmised from the fact that the film's only two nude scenes display him; and did or do Germans really not use a shower curtain when taking a shower in a standard bathtub??) and that he hanged himself in a French prison in 1982 -- he'd been repatriated to France after stabbing three people in a drunken brawl in Berlin -- provided a healthy frisson to the proceedings of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul; Fassbinder (who has an unbilled bit as Emmi's loutish son-in-law, Eugen) himself died a few weeks later. He dedicated his last feature film, an adaptation of Jean Genet's novel Querelle, to him. More troubling, in a way, is the fact that El Hedi ben Salem's voice was dubbed by Wolfgang Hess; this suggests, at minimum, that Fassbinder felt that ben Salem's voice would've been too unintelligible to the average German moviegoer, even restricted to primary school level, "me Tarzan, you Jane"-type dialogue. (Fassbinder was also the producer on Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.)
Ali gives an Arabic equivalent of the Gallic shrug with the recurring phrase "Kif-kif?" ("Who cares?") when confronted with the vicissitudes of life; when it comes to the thorny problem of understanding and tolerating each other, if not loving each other, we'd all damn well better care. One can only regret -- again -- Fassbinder's untimely passing, and wonder what he would've made of the current cultural tensions in Germany and Europe.
PS: The entry for Ali: Fear Eats the Soul in Richard Skorman's Off-Hollywood Movies: A Film Lover's Guide (NY: Harmony Books [a division of Crown Publishers, Inc.], 1989; ISBN: 0-517-56863-2) is riddled with inaccuracies as to the city in which it is set, plot points, and which actor destroys Emmi's TV set when she introduces her children to Ali as her husband; caveat lector.