Just watched this movie again. Touched. Watched it 3 times.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071141
Angst essen Seele auf (1974)
aka "Fear Eats the Soul"
- posted on 02/01/2009
This powerful and gentle film tells the story of love and marriage of Emmi, a 60+ widowed German cleaning lady and Ali, a Moroccan immigrant mechanic who is more than 20 (I think close to 30) years her younger. Their affair and the decision to marry shocked everyone who knew Emmi: her grown children, her neighbors, coworkers (mostly, middle-aged widows as herself) and even the owner of a neighborhood grocery shop where she has been a loyal customer for years.
The way clever and observant Fassbinder looks at their struggle to keep the relationship is deeply pessimistic - the couple could survive the obstacles that society would create for them. They can survive disapproval, misunderstanding and prejudice but at the very moment they think all problems are in the past, they find the emptiness inside and two lonely hearts together are even worse than one. The more I think of it the more I realize that "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul" is among the best, the most poignant, gentlest and heartbreaking descriptions of unavailability for happiness ever filmed.
What makes the movie even more poignant is the fact that both Fassbinder and El Hedi ben Salem, the man whom Fassbinder loved and who played Ali committed suicide in the same year, Fassbinder - a few weeks after El Hedi. The film is also a love letter to El Hedi. In one of the film's most moving scene, Emmi looks at the man with whom she so suddenly and desperately fell in love with admiration, longing, and wise sadness while he dries himself after the shower. It is not only Emmi looks at Ali, it is Rainer looks with love and affection at the man he loved through the lenses of his camera. - posted on 02/02/2009
Personal life
Fassbinder was entangled in multiple romantic relationships with women, but more frequently with men. His personal life, always well publicized, was riddled with gossip and scandal. Early in his career, he had a lasting but fractured relationship with Irm Hermann, a former secretary whom he forced to become an actress.[15] Hermann, who idolized him, was tormented and tortured by him for over a decade.[16] She even claimed domestic violence abuse: ¡°He couldn't conceive of my refusing him, and he tried everything. He almost beat me to death on the streets of Bochum ....¡±[17] In 1977, Hermann became romantically involved with another man and became pregnant by him. Fassbinder proposed to her and offered to adopt the child; she turned him down.[18]
Fassbinder's main love interest during his early period as a film director was Gunther Kaufmann. Kaufmann was not a trained actor and entered cinema when, in 1970, Fassbinder fell madly in love with him. The director tried to buy his love with movie roles and expensive gifts.[19] Kaufmann famously smashed up four Lamborghinis in a year. That he was heterosexual, married and the father of two was not a deterrent for Fassbinder.
Although he claimed to be opposed to marriage as an institution, Fassbinder married Ingrid Caven, a recurrent actress in many of his films, in 1971. Their wedding reception was recycled in the film he was making at that time, The American Soldier. Their relationship of mutual admiration survived the complete failure of their two-year marriage. ¡°Ours was a love story in spite of the marriage,¡± Ingrid explained in an interview, adding about her former husband's sexuality: ¡°Rainer was a homosexual who also needed a woman. It¡¯s that simple and that complex.¡±[20] Neither Irm Hermann, nor Ingrid Caven or Juliane Lorenz, the three most important women of Fassbinder¡¯s life, were disturbed by his homosexuality.[20][21]
In 1971, Fassbinder fell in love with El Hedi ben Salem, a Berber from Morocco. Their turbulent relationship ended violently in 1974.[22] Salem, famously cast as Ali in Fear Eats the Soul, hanged himself in jail in 1982. Fassbinder, who barely outlived his former lover, dedicated his last film, Querelle, to Salem.
Armin Meier, a former butcher who was almost illiterate and who had spent his early years in an orphanage, was Fassbinder's lover from 1974 to 1978.[23] After Fassbinder broke up with him, Meier committed suicide on Fassbinder¡¯s birthday.[24] He was found dead in their apartment only days later. Devastated by Armin¡¯s suicide, Fassbinder made In a Year with Thirteen Moons to exorcise his pain.
In the last four years of his life, Fassbinder's companion was Juliane Lorentz, the editor of his films from that period. They were about to get married in different occasions and even had a mock wedding ceremony during a trip to the U.S., but actually never did marry.[25] They were still living together at the time of his death.
[edit] Controversy
The scandals and controversies ensured that in Germany itself Fassbinder was permanently in the news, making calculatedly provocative remarks in interviews. His work often received mixed reviews from the national critics, many of whom began to take him seriously only after the foreign press had hailed him as a great director.
Fassbinder¡¯s reputation in his own country was entangled almost continually in controversy. There were frequent expos¨¦s of his lifestyle in the press, and attacks from all sides from groups his films offended.[26] His television series Eight Hours Do Not Make a Day was cut from eight to five episodes after pressure from conservatives.[26] The playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz sued for Fassbinder's adaptation of his play Jail Bait, alleging that it was obscene. Lesbians and feminists accused Fassbinder of misogyny (in presenting women as complicit in their own oppression) in his ¡°Women¡®s Picture¡±.[27] [26] The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant has been cited by some feminist and gay critics as both homophobic and sexist.[26] Gays complained of misrepresentation in Fox and his Friends.[26] Conservatives attacked him for his association with the radical left. Marxists said he had sold out his political principles in his depictions of left-intellectual manipulations in Mother K¨¹sters' Trip to Heaven and of a late-blooming terrorist in The Third Generation. Berlin Alexanderplatz was moved to a late night television slot amid widespread complaints that it was unsuitable for children.[26] The most heated criticism came for his play Garbage, the City, and Death, whose scheduled performance at the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt was cancelled early in 1975 amid charges of anti-semitism. In the turmoil, Fassbinder resigned from his directorship of that prestigious theater complex, complaining that the play had been misinterpreted.[26]
Fassbinder did little to discourage the personalized nature of the attacks on himself and his work. He seemed to provoke them by his aggressively anti-bourgeois lifestyle, symbolized in his black leather jacket, battered hat, dark glasses and perennial scowl.[26]
[edit] Death
By the time he made his last film, Querelle (1982), heavy doses of drugs and alcohol had apparently become necessary to sustain his unrelenting work habits. On the night of June 9 -10, 1982, Wolf Gremm, director of the film Kamikaze 1989 (1982), which starred Fassbinder, was staying in his apartment.[28] At 3:30 a.m, when Juliane Lorentz arrived home, she heard the noise of television in Fassbinder¡¯s room, but she could not hear him snoring. Though not allowed to enter the room uninvited, she went in, and she found him lying on the bed, dead, a cigarette still between his lips.[28] A thin ribbon of blood trickled from one nostril.[29] It was ten days after his thirty-seventh birthday.
The cause of death was reported as heart failure resulting from a lethal interaction between sleeping pills and cocaine. The script for his next film, Rosa Luxemburg, was found next to him.
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