"Sirk has said a director's philosophy is lighting and camera angles. And Sirk has made the tenderest films I know; they are the films of someone who loves people and doesn't despise them as we do."-Rainer Werner FassbinderThe unlikely love between a washerwoman in her sixties (Brigitte Mira) and a Moroccan Gastarbeiter (El Hedi Ben Salem) twenty years her junior is sealed by a word: "Yes." Muscular Ali and diminutive Emmi redefine each other ("You not old woman. You big heart"). They wall off the hatred of neighbors, shopkeepers, horrid children, for a little bit of heaven, until they are unexpectedly defeated by a plate of couscous. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is almost pure emotion shot through with arrows of revelation until, like Ali's anxious gut, it begins to bleed. This is Fassbinder's most beautiful homage to Douglas Sirk, his interpretation of All That Heaven Allows, in which country-club matron Jane Wyman falls in love with gardener Rock Hudson. Gone is Jane's giant picture window; where Sirk's sadness is in America's split from nature, Fassbinder finds an even more basic split, from humanity. Nowhere is his trademark framing-the indoor long-shot-more aptly integrated, nowhere his jewelbox colors more brilliantly contrasted with the reality they adorn. Repeated Friday, August 1.