Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s modestly beautiful compositions and expressive, fluid camerawork highlight this story of an unexpected romance in 70s Germany between an older woman and a Moroccan immigrant. Unfortunately, Fassbinder can only find humanity in the context of their troubled relationship – every single one of the film’s others characters is a grotesque, despicable misanthrope.
Ali is generally considered one of the peaks of the auteur-centered German New Wave, so this is a hot take, if you can possibly have a hot take on a 40-year-old foreign film movement. Fassbinder’s unrelentingly bleak outlook simplifies the film, reducing it to a kind of binary moralism in which there are only martyrs and assholes, robbing it of any potential poignancy. There are some very memorable scenes (Ali staring into the mirror of a bar’s men’s room and beginning to slap himself repeatedly across the face in shame and fury) and the way social intolerance slowly infects the couple’s interactions is more subtly handled.
But I couldn’t help but groan every time Fassbinder introduced another one-dimensional figure of shallow brutality. It reminded me, unlikely enough, of how modern romantic comedies force viewers to watch their protagonists squirm and suffer helplessly under a series of contrived misunderstandings and humiliating scenarios.
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