Emmi, a 60-year-old cleaning woman, falls in love with, and marries Ali, a much younger Moroccan guest worker. Emmi’s family and neighbours disapprove of their relationship until they realize they can profit from it. But the pressure is too much for both of them. A “film about an impossible love which is nonetheless possible”. (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

One evening, Emmi, a 60-year-old cleaner, stops at a pub visited by foreign guest workers. She is simply waiting for the rain to stop and orders a Coke to kill time. One of the men asks her to dance; Ali is a big, bearded Moroccan and much younger than Emmi. His real name is completely different, but all the guest workers from his country are simply called Ali in Germany, as he tells his partner. He had really only asked the strange old woman to dance because the stout blond bar owner Barbara and her guests were about to start laughing at her. But then Ali sits down with Emmi and the two talk about their loneliness.

Because this is the first time that they find someone to talk to about their troubles, Ali walks Emmi back to her flat and she invites him in for a brandy. And because it is still raining outside and Ali has to share a room with four other guest workers, she also invites him to stay the night. They sleep together. Emmi is horrified when she wakes up the next morning and is suddenly frightened, but "fear eats the soul" as Ali says. The two lonely people have fallen in love with one another. He is waiting outside her door in the evening and proposes to her a few days later. The couple celebrate their wedding alone in an expensive Italian restaurant. The pressure exerted on the unequal couple by the world around them grows daily. Emmi's children are ashamed, the neighbours harrass them, her workmates refuse to speak to her and the tradesman on the corner refuses to serve Ali. Emmi defends her good fortune against all enviers, but then the pressure becomes too much for her and she sets off on holiday with Ali.

The people are all much friendlier when they come back because they need Emmi and want something from her. Ali flees this time because even Emmi demands that he adapt to German customs. When she refuses to cook couscous for him, he goes to Barbara, who cooks for him and sleeps with him. He also returns to Barbara the next day when Emmi proudly introduces her muscular young husband to her colleagues. Emmi looks for him in the repairshop where he works; in front of his mates, he denies all knowledge of the old woman. That evening, he boxes his own ears for what he did and gambles away all his earnings in Barbara's pub. Emmi comes and he dances with her as on the first evening, but suddenly he collapses screaming in pain. A stomach ulcer, says the doctor, that's quite normal among guest workers and there's nothing that can be done about it. Emmi is sitting beside Ali's bed.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder described ANGST ESSEN SEELE AUF as a "film about a love that is really impossible, but possible after all". He includes the film in his personal top ten favourite German films and ranks it eighth in the top ten of his own films. The socially critical melodrama about an old woman and a foreigner is clearly inspired by Douglas Sirk's style, both aesthetically and dramatically; Fassbinder described Sirk's films as the "most tender" and repeatedly held him up as a model for German cinema. ANGST ESSEN SEELE AUF primarily recalls Sirk's film ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, in which Jane Wyman is a rich widow who falls in love with Rock Hudson playing a gardener 15 years her junior and who is consequently exposed to such massive social pressure in a small American town that their love is almost destroyed and threatens to end tragically.

Fassbinder had also originally intended to give his film a tragic end. The idea had first occurred to him in 1970, three years before ANGST ESSEN SEELE AUF was actually produced. In DER AMERIKANISCHE SOLDAT, a cinema story inspired by American gangster films, Margarethe von Trotta plays the maid Margarethe who tells the story of the cleaner Emmi and the guest worker Ali exactly as it was subsequently produced by Fassbinder, but with a different ending. In the earlier version, Emmi is one day found murdered with the impression of a signet ring on her neck, a ring with the letter A such as that worn by Ali. Although this tragic end has been taken out of the film, ANGST ESSEN SEELE AUF is clearly made up of two parts. In the first part, the prejudice confronting the couple is so great that it unites the lovers to stand firm and defy the world; in the second part, the outer pressure recedes and becomes an inner pressure, the couple begin to argue and Ali feels his identity is threatened by Emmi's insistence that he adjust.

While the problems cease to exist for her, this is not the case with Ali; he is the really tragic figure in the film, not Emmi. Fassbinder's critical presentation of the problems surrounding guest workers is certainly not naturalistic. This is clear from the stylization of minor roles and in the camera movements. The director also indulges in a very special gag by playing Emmi's viciously racist son-in-law Eugen himself. As in Douglas Sirk's film, there are virtually no close-ups in ANGST ESSEN SEELE AUF and there are few sweeps, although the camera is more mobile than in Fassbinder's earlier films whose optical moments were still strongly inspired by stage aesthetics. Highly artificial, almost static pictures predominate.

The film's most important stylistic means is to show a room and its occupants through a door setting the scene within a frame symbolizing their isolation and confinement. The technique of using mirrors is already present in ANGST ESSEN SEELE AUF; it is a technique that is later intensified almost to the point of mannerism in CHINESISCHES ROULETTE. According to Fassbinder, "realism is always inside the viewer. Everything that is concerned with realism can only happen inside the viewer's head." The realism of ANGST ESSEN SEELE AUF is still topical but the falteringly utopian moment and the possibility of a fundamentally impossible love seem more utopian than ever today.

Production Country

Germany (DE)

Production Period

1973/1974

Production Year

1974

color

color

Aspect Ratio

1:1,85

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Feature Film

Genre

Drama

Topic

Love, Relationship / Family, Psychology, Film History, Migration / Flight / Exile

Available Media

DVD

Original Version

German (de)

DVD

Subtitles

German (de), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (es), Portuguese (Brazil) (pt), Chinese (zh), Italian (it), Russian (ru), Japanese (ja), Arabic (ar)