der rosenkavalier
by Douglas Messerli
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (screenwriter and
director) Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) / 1974
While underlining their simple pleasure with one another's company,
Fassbinder also deepens the psychological underpinnings of Fear Eats the Soul by first showing Emmi frozen out of conversation
with her cleaning-women friends, but later, after being reaccepted into their
little claque, herself rejecting a new worker from Yugoslavia. When the
neighbors, who have previously shunned her and her new husband, discover that
he is useful to help move things to the basement, Emmi shows off her lover to
the neighbor women as she might a trophy, forcing him to briefly pose as a
muscle man. The language-barrier, moreover, grows deeper as the movie puts forward
its narrative, rather than becoming resolved. Throughout Ali speaks in simple
noun-verb expressions, which make him appear as a sort of inarticulate beast
demanding, as eventually he does, "couscous." Emmi's simple statement
that he must learn to get used to German food becoming a reassertion of all
that she has previously stood against.
In short, what at first might have simply seemed as a kind of artificed
presentation of social differentiations, gradually builds up into a far more
complex series of concerns. If Fassbinder's long camera shots, alternated with
an almost claustrophobic condensation of these two lonely people has
melodramatically restated the film's themes, by the end of the movie, we begin
to comprehend them as representing the yawning gaps of understanding and
empathy for their very
In short, although this is truly a heterosexual drama on the surface,
Fassbinder has diverted it quite firmly into the world of queer drama. All the
feelings of outsiderness and isolation in love are precisely those of gay men
in the early 1970s. I was there. In some senses LGBTQ+ individuals where far freer
that people who grew up after Stonewall perceived us to be; but in other
respects, Stonewall was not an overnight wonder. It took years to break through
the walls of racial and cultural differences that Fassbinder uses as metaphors,
like Sirk, to describe queer behavior.
Even at this moment of great insight, just after Emmi has returned to
symbolically begin anew—asking Barbara to play the same song to which she and
Ali danced the first night when she darted into the place to escape the
rain—Fassbinder introduces another inexplicable event that compromises her
desires. Ali falls to the floor in pain, suffering, as we are told by a doctor,
the results of living a life filled, not only with fear, but with the
anxiousness of not knowing what is expected of him and where his life will end.
The doctor's prognosis, that the patient will be cured but only temporarily,
speaks volumes, predicting the brutal failures of love that Fassbinder would
reveal in his films for the rest of his life.
That great sense of angst within the film, moreover, was played out in
Fassbinder's real life, when in 1982—the same year as Fassbinder's death—ben
Salem stabbed three people in Berlin before hanging himself in his prison cell
Los Angeles, June 1, 2012 | Reprinted
from World Cinema Review.
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