 A FilmExposed Film Review |
 Dir: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1974, 93 mins
Cast: Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem
‘Happiness is not always fun’, reads the stark epigraph with which Fear Eats The Soul, perhaps German New Cinema enfant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s greatest work, begins. The happiness in question is that which Emmi (Mira), a dowdy Munich widow, finds with Ali (ben Salem), a Moroccan immigrant worker almost half her age. Fassbinder skilfully evinces both the tenderness of this inter-generational, interracial match and the ugly, racist response to it on the part of Emmi’s friends, family and neighbours.
Fear Eats The Soul is an adaptation of Douglas Sirk’s melodramatic masterpiece All That Heaven Allows (1955), which also provided the inspiration for Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven (2002). Like both of the latter films, each scene and relationship in Fear Eats The Soul is carefully crafted to offer a pointed social critique without ever sacrificing art for polemicism’s sake. The camera, knowing just when to linger and when to move on, works tirelessly to leave Emmi isolated - by door frames, corridors and windows - as her peers ostracise her following her marriage to Ali. The scene in which she presents him to her family is agonising in its silent duration: they stare, utterly static in their disbelief. It is painterly in its composition, as is the long, lonely shot of Emmi and Ali looking very small and out of place at an expensive restaurant where they go on a miserable, wet afternoon to celebrate their marriage. These masterful touches show the extent to which Fassbinder had trimmed away the hysterical edge to his film making of the late-60s and early-70s.
The ugliness of the reaction to Emmi and Ali’s relationship is so powerful because their relationship has been brought to life with such uncommon tenderness. Seeing Ali showering Emmi can only say “You are beautiful, Ali”, her intonation an exquisite mingling of joy and sorrow; the night after they first meet, when it becomes apparent that both want more from this relationship, their union is settled with a simple, shy repetition of the word ‘yes’.
Emmi and Ali know what they are letting themselves in for. Ali tersely describes the immigrant’s position in Germany as “German master. Arab dog”, adding that since the Munich Olympics Arabs have become even more maligned. But as Emmi’s passivity develops into a bullish animosity towards those around her who are disgusted by her actions, those same people suddenly shift their positions. They do so because they need various things from her – storage space, her time, her money - and it is this chilling portrayal of human relationships boiled down to their transactional, exploitative foundations - a process in which Emmi, distressingly oblivious to her own hypocrisy, engages - that gives the film its lasting power.
There is a vein of optimism, however, that runs through Fear Eats The Soul. Several younger characters possess more enlightened attitudes, both towards Emmi and Ali’s relationship and the question of race generally, while the final scene, perfect in its silent articulation of the challenges that remain before them, leaves the lovers at a crossroads from which they just might prosper. |
