Angst essen Seele auf (1974) - film review

One rainy evening, Emmi Kurowski, a 60-year-old cleaning lady, ducks into an Arab bar to avoid being soaked.  She immediately notices a Moroccan worker, twenty years her junior, and invites him to dance with her.  The Moroccan introduces himself as Ali and an unlikely friendship develops between the two.  Emmi takes her new friend back to her small apartment, where she has lived alone since the death of her husband.  After a meal, Ali is about to leave when Emmi invites him to spend the night in her spare bedroom.  The grateful Moroccan accepts and the inevitable happens - the two lonely people end up in bed together.   Emmi and Ali’s burgeoning love affair prompts a hostile reaction from their entourage.  Emmi’s family and fellow workers ostracise her, disgusted that she should have stooped so low as to sleep with a filthy Arab.  Ali’s friends are equally incensed and cannot understand why he should live with an old whore.   Then Emmi is warned by her landlord’s son that she has broken the terms of her tenancy agreement by subletting her apartment. In a moment of panic, she declares that she and Ali are soon to be married.  When she explains this to her lover, the Moroccan says this is a good idea, so they get married without delay.  This merely exacerbates the rift between Emmi and her family, so she suggests that she and Ali go away for a long holiday.  When they return, the antagonism appears to have abated and Emmi and Ali are accepted as an ordinary married couple.  But, as Emmi strives for social acceptance, Ali fears that his Arab identity is under threat, and their relationship slowly begins to fall apart...

Fear Eats the Soul, Rainer Fassbinder’s humanist masterpiece, was one of the defining films of New German Cinema in the mid-1970s.  It is both an incisive depiction of the social conflict and racial prejudice that was endemic in post-war Germany and an extraordinarily powerful love story, one of the most poignant and meaningful that has ever been committed to celluloid.  The film was rewarded with two prizes at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974 and is widely considered to be the absolute pinnacle of Fassbinder’s achievements.  It is certainly the most accessible and moving works from this unique creative talent, a film that once seen you will never forget.

In between making Martha and Effi Briest, Fassbinder had a four week slot which he filled by writing and shooting this film.  What started out as an exercise in filmmaking technique became one of his most personal and inspired films.  It was also to be Fassbinder’s most blatant tribute to Douglas Sirk, the American filmmaker he most admired and who had an enormous impact on his oeuvre.  The similarities between Fear Eats the Soul and Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) are readily apparent.  Both films involve two lonely individuals from very different social milieu who are rejected by their respective communities as they embark on a passionate romance.  Like Sirk before him, Fassbinder used the popular but oft-reviled melodrama form to critique contemporary society.  Whereas Sirk was preoccupied with class and bourgeois addiction to materialism, Fassbinder dared to examine the issue of racial intolerance, one of the great taboos of his time.  

Much of the searing humanist impact of Fear in the Soul derives from the performances of its two lead actors.  Brigitte Mira surely deserved an Oscar for her heartrending portrayal of Emmi but was honoured with a lesser accolade, at the German Film Awards in 1974.  One of her country’s most respected character actors, Mira had a reputation for playing unsavoury characters in a sympathetic light.  Interestingly, she began her career in the propaganda series Liese und Miese, cast as a character who was meant to be the antithesis of the good Nazi.  The part of the handsome Moroccan was played, with just as much conviction and human feeling, by El Hedi ben Salem, Fassbinder’s lover at the time.

The fact that Rainer Fassbinder spent so little time on this film could be what makes it such a potent piece of cinema.  This is a film that springs from the heart, not the intellect.  Lacking the ponderous political undertones and laboured stylisation of some of Fassbinder’s more elaborate and considered films, Fear eats the Soul has a raw, visceral quality, superficially very simple, and yet inordinately complex when you look beneath the surface.  

Racial prejudice takes many forms and this film shows us that overt racism may not be its worst facet.  Perhaps more disturbing is the pressure that society places on racial minorities to conform, to relinquish all vestige of their cultural identity to be accepted.   Once the outsider has been tamed, a more insidious form of racism takes over, one that is nurtured not by fear, but by an instinctive dislike for the unlike from which none of us is immune.

Having overcome flagrant hostility to her union with a coloured man, the female protagnist in this film reveals that she too has xenophobic tendencies.  Like the good little Nietzschen disciple that she was in her youth, she will not be happy until her husband has been completely assimilated into German society.  The question is: which is stronger, love or innate racist sentiment?  Fassbinder opts for the optimistic outcome, but in doing so he provokes his audience to reflect on what is arguably the greatest social concern of our time.

© James Travers 2010

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