Fassbinder's strange remake of an American melodrama about inter-racial love

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) was one of his first melodramas and is closely modeled on the Douglas Sirk tearjerker All that Heaven Allows (which I know only through its Todd Haynes remake, Far From Heaven). Fassbinder's remake is, like all of his films that I know of, odd and strange in many ways. Both the original and RWF's Ali are about a white woman who falls in love with a black man and suffers from social ostracism as a result. In the original, as far as I know or recall, the black man w/ whom the woman falls in love is her gardener; though not of the same social set as she, he's a serious and dignified man (with an interest in the arts) and is of about her age; also, she's reeling from the pain of her unsuccessful marriage, as her husband leads a not-so-secret double life. RWF's Ali differs in many regards, most notably that Ali is a good 20 years younger than the woman (Emmi), she is widowed, and she is not particularly attractive nor is she well off (perhaps a little more so than Ali, but she's no obvious mark or catch). So right from the start this movie feels odd: Why would an older (i.e., at least 50, parent of three adult children) woman walk into a seedy bar to take shelter from the rain, and, if she did so, why would she agree to let one of the men drinking there walk her home, then invite him to her apartment, encourage him to spend the night in he spare room, which leads to sex and, surprisingly, to an enduring relationship? It makes no sense - nor does it make sense to others in the movie. Ali is a tall, handsome guy, an immigrant from Morocco who speaks a childishly awkward German - we can see what draws her to him, though, but not the reverse. In any event, the world turns against Emmi: he neighbors, her co-workers, and especially her children - and she endures social ostracism and harassment on every front. She stands by her man, and he by her, up to a point. But over time, the hostility diminishes - RWF doesn't really attempt to explain or account for this softening; he never makes Ali more than a helpful stud - but as the social ostracism eases Ali begins to play the field, resurrecting an affair he'd been having with the barmaid (the bar in which much of the movie takes place is a hangout for Ali and other Moroccan immigrants), so RWF pulls our sympathy away from Ali as well as from Emmi: Perhaps he'd been playing her all along? In some ways, this movie feels really contemporary, as we today are far more aware than we were in the 70s of the plight and acceptance (or not) of African immigrants in Europe and the U.S.; in other ways, the movie feels quite old-school, w/ it's almost cliched portrayal of a Town Without Pity star-crossed romance: It's all too obvious which are the good guys and which are the oafs, but what does keep our interest is the edginess of the film: What's in it for Emmi? For Ali? Why do their family members and friends turn against them? What brings them around, in the end?