On Criterion, I watched Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, a 1974 film written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It's loosely inspired by Douglas Sirk's 1955 film All That Heaven Allows (which Todd Haynes was also inspired by for his 2002 film Far From Heaven), and centers on an interracial couple, a white German widow named Emmi (Brigitte Mirra), who is about 60 years old, and Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), a Moroccan man 20 years her junior, who meet in a bar and develop a deep relationship, and get married quickly out of convenience. They face a lot of racism and xenophobia from her neighbors, her family, and the bar patrons, as the Germans say a lot of outright ugly and racist comments about Arabic people, especially as the film takes place shortly after the murder of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
The film is interesting because it doesn't just frame Emmi as being targeted and being gossiped about by her neighbors, but it also frames Ali as being othered, often referred to as a "foreigner, and being both racially fetishized by white women and treated as if he is less "pure" than they are. He doesn't feel a sense of belonging among German society, and when he wants Emmi to make couscous for him, she brushes him off by telling him he should get used to German culture and not expect Arabic cuisine.
Emmi just wants love and companionship as a widow, and is treated as a kook by her family and friends when she introduces them to Ali, and they react with "death in their eyes," as Ali describes the look one of her friends gave him. Ali faces discrimination from a shopkeeper, claiming he can't understand Ali when he speaks broken German, in short and halted sentences, but using that as an excuse not to serve him, and Emmi defends him as her husband. Yet when they return from a vacation and the community is nicer to her and polite to him (though not overcoming their prejudices), Emmi begins to fall into acting like her neighbors, ordering Ali around and treating him like a servant and a sex object, leaving him to feel more alienated by her.
In real life, ben Salem was Fassbinder's then-partner (and their relationship ended in disaster and tragedy), and Fassbinder cameos as Emmi's misogynist son in-law Eugen. Irm Hermann, who played Emmi's daughter Krista, had had a volatile and abusive relationship with Fassbinder.
I really liked this movie a lot, as a character drama about racism and prejudice in a small community, and the pace flowed well in a 90-minute movie that made it really engrossing to watch. I had heard of it through the Criterion Closet video with playwright and actor Jeremy O. Harris, who highly recommended it as part of his picks, and I'm glad I checked it out.
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