Despair

Rainer Werner Fassbinder is a difficult director to love or hate. For every exceptional and original film he made (such as "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul" and "Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven"), he then made two which were bizarre and artsy...and the sort of stuff most folks would hate ("Querelle" quickly comes to mind). To me, "Despair" falls into this latter category...a film the average person wouldn't normally see in the first place but which they would hate. And, a film that artsy folks would adore. I like some artsy films but found this one interminably boring even though it stars one of my favorite actors, Dirk Bogarde.

The film is set in the final years of the Weimar Republic...during the rise of the Nazis in the early 30s. Herman (Bogarde) is a Jewish Russian emigree who owns a successful candy company. However, he appears to be losing his mind through the course of the story and he has a strange obsession that a homeless man is his doppleganger....even though the man looks little like Herman. At first, Herman befriends the man and offers him a job...later you learn that Herman's kindness is a mask for his own sinister plans.

For me, watching this film was about as much fun at staring at the wall for 90 minutes. Slow and plodding beyond belief as well as nonsensical, I simply found watching this strange film to be nearly impossible the more I watched.

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.

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Dirk Bogarde stars in this 1978 Fassbinder film as Hermann, a chocolate factory owner living in Berlin during the Weimar Republic who suffers from dissociation. He dreams of escape. On his travels he meets a homeless man who he thinks can imitate him in a scam. This will involve his faked murder so that he can escape his life. His wife will then receive a substantial insurance pay out because of his supposed death. In reality Hermann will vanish to Switzerland, live below the radar and start a new life. Will Hermann's plan go without a hitch?

I love the mystery of this film. It really is a puzzle of a film and sweeps us along on it's gorgeous journey. Twist follows turn and back again.

The whole cast are perfect with Dirk Bogarde being perfect as Hermann. The screenplay is brilliantly adopted from a Nabokov novel by Tom Stoppard with snappy and wicked dialogue that positively crackles.

The look of the film is muted and also beautiful because of it. It lends massively to why the film works so well as it's visually and uniformly a treat for the eyes. Enjoy the ride which will keep you guessing until the final frame.

Fassbinder took on a heavy task in choosing to make a film of Nabokov's "Despair". In the novel, the reader slowly comes to realize that the narrator is unreliable, and the truth of what's going on creeps up little by little by little. That isn't possible in a cinematic adaptation of this story: the viewer sees the truth at once; there can't be a slow reveal. Filming an unfilmable novel certainly put Fassbinder at a disadvantage.

Given this, Fassbinder instead focused on his strengths: getting wonderful Douglas Sirk-like melodramatic performances from his actors, and going for the emotional jugular. Parts of "Despair" are surprisingly light and even comical, but these serve to set up the subsequent tragic tone and histrionic intensity.

Like his later "Berlin Alexanderplatz", Fassbinder exaggerates several aspects of his source novels. He queer-ifies the story, making clearer the ambiguously gay dimensions of the narrative -- "Despair" becomes a tale of homosexual paranoia. Fassbinder also places the narrative firmly in its historical moment: it's emphasized that the protagonist is half-Jewish, and this becomes an occasion to explore not only racial paranoia, but the specific events and cultural attitudes that existed in Germany as the Nazis rose to power.

But most of all, "Despair" and "Alexanderplatz" are studies of characters who psychologically disintegrate and descend into madness. Fassbinder is cinema's great poet of the manic episode and the psychotic break. Dirk Bogarde is masterful as Hermann Hermann, a man consumed by discontent and partly-justified paranoia, whose obsessions drive him into progressively stranger behavior. Like many of Fassbinder's mentally ill protagonists, Hermann is both likeable and capable of awful things; the viewer sympathizes as he loses touch with reality and his world crumbles.

Strong recommendation for Dirk Bogarde's stellar performance as Hermann Hermann, and for Fassbinder's fearless dialogue with madness and tragedy.

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.