Quite often when she's passing this bar in Munich, sixty-year-old cleaning woman Emmy (Brigitte Mira) hears the strains of North African music drifting through the air, and it intrigues her. Therefore one night, she makes the excuse that she wants to come in out of the rain to investigate, and finds the bar populated by a couple of German staff and a handful of Arab immigrant workers here to relax for a while. Emmy takes a cola to drink and the bar owner cynically invites one of the Arabs, known as Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) to dance with her, not realising what this will begin...
Writer and director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a huge fan of fellow German director Douglas Sirk and his lush melodrama he made during his nineteen-fifties heyday; one of Fassbinder's favourites was All That Heaven Allows which explains why this film resembled that to an extent. Where the Sirk had concentrated on class prejudice, his successor had racial prejudice on his mind, and cast his then-lover as Ali to underline the angst he felt over their relationship. Of course, it's difficult to watch this now if you knew the truth of their romance, where Fassbinder had given ben Salem a movie to star in as his highest devotion of affection, then rejected him shortly after.
This led to the now-emotionally shattered actor getting into trouble with the police when he stabbed three in a brawl, and then in prison he hanged himself, a tragic end for a life that may have been far happier if Fassbinder had never taken a shine to him. Weirdly, there were echoes of their relationship in Fear Eats the Soul, especially in the manner it plays out to the end of the film as Emmy and Ali fall in love, an odd couple which offends polite Munich society which is not half as polite as they would like to think they are. After striking up conversation and finding little in common other than their loneliness - Emmy's husband died twenty years before, Ali is isolated in this foreign land - there develops an attraction.
Here you have to accept that attraction as genuine, and not as it looks more like a concotion to put across Fassbinder's message about bigotry with a hefty dose of his real life situation with his leading man, and in that regard he succeeded very well as he surrounds the couple with characters who cannot believe what they are doing. And when they get married, almost on the spur of the moment, many hands are thrown up in horror as the moral abyss of their racism erupts, ostracising them both, with even Emmy's friends turning against her, all because they hate the Arabs for what look to us like the flimsiest of reasons even if the Olympics are mentioned. As if that wasn't bad enough, Emmy's grown up children are equally ignorant, and tell her they never want to speak to her again - one son even kicks in her television in rage.
All through this the couple remain steadfast in their love, after all it's just about all they have to hang on to when everyone around them is rejecting them so viciously, and you could accuse Fassbinder of laying on the racism a bit thick, with almost everyone outside the marriage seething with intolerance, but then, for the final act, things begin to mellow as many realise they cannot carry on like this forever, especially as Emmy and Ali are so inoffensive in personality. Actually that's another issue you may have in that Ali (which isn't even his real name) is poorly developed in character, and remains something of an enigma even at the end where we discover what living in a prejudiced society has done to him. Does he want to be mothered by Emmy? Couldn't Fassbinder come up with a better motivation than his search for decent couscous? Anyway, the damage has been done and the story ends on a note of hopelesness in contrast to Sirk's guarded optimism; one of those films worth thinking over.
