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Though little known in the English-speaking world, Erich Kästner’s slim novel originally translated in 1932 as “Fabian. The Story of a Moralist” is a brilliantly astute rendering of life in Weimar Berlin, straightforward and yet surreal, witty and perverse. To tackle it in cinema would seem like an impossible task, and while Dominik Graf’s “Fabian – Going to the Dogs” is to be commended for getting quite a lot right, the movie is blowsy where the book is succinct, awkwardly paced and portentous where Kästner is consistently rhythmical and unpretentious. Set in a teetering world of dissoluteness and disillusion in which a good man without professional ambition awakens to life’s promise only to have it all torn away, the story has modern resonances that Graf (“The Beloved Sisters” among many others) keenly underlines, and while the film’s core is affectingly developed, the rest tries too hard to expose...