Despair

Fassbinder turns Nabokov into a multi-level visually stimulating art piece that is challenging to the mind, and where mirrors play with dreams and reality, insanity and absurdity, and a complex geopolitical situation in Nazi Germany. turns Nabokov into a multi-level visually stimulating art piece that is challenging to the mind, and where mirrors play with dreams and reality, insanity and absurdity, and a complex geopolitical situation in Nazi Germany.

Shot in English on a budget that nearly equaled the cost of his first fifteen films, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Despair has wit and style yet its attempt to recreate the dark, comedic genius of Vladimir Nabokov left me unmoved and uninvolved. Based on Nabokov's novel Despair (apparently intended as a parody of Dostoevsky), and adapted for the screen by Tom Stoppard, the film describes the descent into madness of wealthy chocolate entrepreneur Hermann Herman (Dirk Bogarde). Set in Germany on the eve of the Third Reich, scenes of the Nazis assaulting Jewish-owned businesses are sprinkled throughout the film but to no apparent purpose. Herman has left his Russian home to live in Berlin and constantly fantasizes about the beauty of the Russian winters and whispers `Russia, which we have lost forever...' to his wife, Lydia (Andrea Ferreol). He is a thoroughly unsympathetic character: cold, calculating, and cynical and Mr. Bogarde's exaggerated mannerisms do not make him any easier to appreciate.

Much of the film takes place inside Herman's stately bourgeois home. Shots of the characters through glass partitions keep the viewer at a distance and the elegant interiors look like an abandoned mausoleum. Lydia's and Herman's relationship is unconvincing and Fassbinder's repeated descriptions of Lydia as an unintelligent sex object border on misogyny. "The flowers of your sensuality would wilt with intelligence," Herman tells his wife whom he always addresses with condescension. In addition to Lydia, we gradually meet other vivid supporting characters: Lydia's cousin, Ardalion; and Dr. Orlovious, an insurance salesman whom Herman mistakenly thinks is a psychiatrist and opens up to.

Herman is convinced that Felix Weber (Klaus Lowitch), a laborer, resembles him as closely as "two drops of blood." though the resemblance is tentative at best (a joke Nabokov wisely saved for his readers until the end of his novella). He has an odd compulsion to observe himself as a stranger and devises a plan to commit the perfect crime, exchanging identities with the worker as a means of escaping his existence. Felix, on the other hand, decides to humor the eccentric Herman with the thought of getting a job. In Despair, Fassbinder constructs a world in the process of falling apart where people march inexorably toward self-destruction and where the journey into light proves to be an illusion. In a world approaching madness, however, Hermann seems to fit perfectly -- no more, no less crazy than the insanity occurring around him.

One would expect a combination of Nabokov and Stoppard would result in amazing cinema. Unfortunately, "Despair" does not count as great cinema, not even as a great Fassbinder film, even though it is a rare Fassbinder film made in English with a German locale. (The problems are similar to Malick's "A Hidden Life": here, too, people except Bogarde, speak English with a heavy German accent.)

Vladimir Nabokov wrote his novel "Despair" as a spoof of Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment." The script includes lines referring to Dostoyevsky and Arthur Conan Doyle. "Despair" the film falls short of achieving/adapting the greatness of Dostoevsky or Conan Doyle. It is possibly because for Nabokov and Fassbinder the mental state of Herman (Bogarde) is paramount than the tale itself.

The audience struggles to come to terms with a clean shaven Herman suddenly sporting an elegant moustache in between sequences. If it was a fake moustache, the audience is not prepared for it by Fassbinder. Or were scenes edited out in the final cut?

Fassbinder was evidently quite familiar with Nabokov. Nabokov wrote Lolita with a lead character named Humbert Humbert. Fassbinder extrapolates the idea in "Despair" (or was it Stoppard?) by calling the lead character in "Despair" Herman Hermann, when Nabokov called him just Herman.

If there was one outstanding aspect in this film it was cinematographer Michael Ballhaus working with mirrors and glass panes in doors. One great shot, creditable to Fassbinder and Ballhaus, was of two Jews continuing to play chess at the street cafe as a Jewish shop is attacked by Nazis followed much later in the film by a distinctly similar shot of the same Jewish duo playing chess with non-distinctive clothes.

Another important aspect of the film is Fassbinder 's dedication of this quaint work to three mentally unstable geniuses: Antonin Artaud (the actor/playwright who introduced The Theatre of Cruelty) , Vincent Van Gogh (the painter who cut off his ear) and Unica Zurn (a painter famous for her paintings of torsos bound with string). And lastly several actors in this film and those supposed to play originally in the film were openly gay as was the director..

What can I say -- watch the film. And don't read the other posters comments -- he didn't like the film, or even bother finishing it but felt compelled to make a list of pointless spoilers in his useless comments.

This was Fassbinders shot at 'commercialism', which he failed at entirely (thankfully) but we are left with a thoughtful examination of the boundaries between self awareness and delusion. A metaphor for post war Germany? Who am I to be so pretentious ...

Strong performances, provocative script, not a light romp but neither is it a heavy slog.

CC

This was good enough to encourage me to read the original Nabokov novel but this Tom Stoppard adaptation as filmed by Fassbinder has real problems. Stoppard suggests that it had been his intention that although we would see Bogarde and his supposed doppelgänger as different, Bogarde's vision, within the film, would be of his own image. If that sounds complicated wait till you see the rather melodramatic screen version. Andrea Ferreol as the ample 'ever moist' child/woman is fantastic (even though it seems she was learning the language on set) but Bogarde is only competent in what is admittedly and almost impossible role(s). There is much going on here in the director's first big budget movie but I feel he should have kept things more simple and not got so carried away with the finer details and contradictions of the inherent absurdity and surreal elements so as to highlight the tragedy of 30s Germany. Interesting and always ambitious but ultimately flawed interpretation.