“I’m alone most of the time. All of the time, really,” confesses Emmi (Brigitte Mira), a German widow, to Ali (El Hedi Ben Salem), a much younger Moroccan she’s just met. “Ali much alone, too,” he confides. “Always working, drinking. Nothing else.” So begins a cross-cultural, cross-generational relationship that leads to marriage, but even then the couple faces prejudice, skepticism and self-doubt before reaching an uneasy, unsettling peace. Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder inverts the Hollywood May-December convention in this love story—an update on Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows.
—Christian Hamaker
Arts & Faith Lists:
2013 Top 25 Marriage Films — #24