Critics reviews

This immaculately staged drama is Fassbinder's assault on the intolerance of 1970s German society... The performances are flawless; the themes remain timely.

The movie has been frequently praised for the moving performances of its leads and for how it so effectively portrays racism against migrant workers living in Germany. But there is more involved in creating a masterpiece than simply having some talented actors and a great script, although these are beneficial as well. Since Fassbinder had intended Ali to be an exercise, and because he had a vision behind it, what exactly distinguishes this film technically upon close study?

The film, like much of Fassbinder's work, keeps seeming to border on classical in form and genre, yet pushes the length of every shot and the stillness of every actor until it seems to reach a Brechtian breaking point.

Sirk lays the groundwork with All That Heaven Allows, though Fassbinder also remembers Aldrich's forthrightness in Autumn Leaves, they're all boiled into a magnificently laconic distillate of taboo and conformism.

Though it may sound like purposefully alienating Marxist homework in theory, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul remains beautifully irresolvable. Fassbinder achieves an emotional, socio-political hyper-awareness scene by scene that culminates, nevertheless, into a film of considerable romantic mystery.

The film's opening epigram, "Happiness is not fun," is another cinematic reference—to a line from a film by another German émigré director, Max Ophüls's "Le Plaisir," from 1952. Fassbinder's historicism is a crucial aspect of his modernism: he didn't just make use of prior forms, he quoted them, and derived from them the ironies implicit in his melodramatic styles...

The style is breathtaking, as was often the case in the director's Hollywood-influenced middle period, evoking Sirk's tracking shots and controlled mise-en-scene while implying the impossibility of their underlying emotion being realized. This paradox is a source of dark humor for Fassbinder and helps the film from becoming merciless: The jokes are to prevent us from weeping.

When critic Thomas Elsaesser writes that "Fassbinder constructs his storyline with the purity of a fable and the emotional impact of tragedy," I can find myself agreeing only with the second half of his formula... But then again, it's the film's impurity that allows for its greatest triumphs — above all, getting us to accept the implausible romance that develops between Emmi and Ali, which Fassbinder can do only through shifting stylistic strategies.

When [Fassbinder] encountered the Sirk films, he had a sort of epiphany: melodrama could provide the means to make people feel and think at the same time. He embarked on the most artistically fruitful period of his career, marked by the apotheosis of Ali, which itself was a remake of All That Heaven Allows. He was suddenly making movies that could rip your heart out and stomp on it, even as they made you question what you're seeing and why.

Fassbinder so often pulls back characters' surfaces to reveal their tortured psyches, reflecting the human condition bracingly back onto his audience. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a prime example of that talent sharpened to its finest point.

Throughout the film, Fassbinder employs a series of remarkably simple framing devices to reinforce the isolation of his characters—from the harsh German culture, each other, and, ultimately, themselves. Doorways, windows and a sea of yellow chairs have a way of stranding Emmi and Ali away from the rest of humanity, just as Fassbinder's dialogue deliriously—almost innocently—references their every step toward buying "a little piece of Heaven."

The stillness of the film is deeply sad. But in the middle of all this sadness lies the possibility Emmi and Ali create when they find each other. The film draws its immense force from its concentration on two simple facts: the world's indifference and the couple's love.