Despair

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..

It's hard for me to stay away from excessive use of superlatives when commenting on what I consider to be Fassbinder's masterpiece. Michael Ballhaus has filmed more than a dozen Fassbinder films, and Despair is a fine example of the value of their collaboration. Several images are stunningly memorable: the water dripping on the eggshells in the sink; the circular tracking shot through the glass walls of Hermann Hermann's office revealing him in his cage; and the auto-voyeurism of Hermann watching himself in bed with his voluptuous, vacant Frau. Doing justice to Nabokov's compelling dialog and canny character studies has been well done before in Kubrick's Lolita, but Tom Stoppard's rendition here was a perfect match for Fassbinder's (and Ballhaus's) visual feast. And if you are somehow not yet a fan of Dirk Bogarde, seeing his performance in Despair will surely make you as ardent an admirer of his work as I have become.

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.

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.

This movie is disturbing. The main character seems to be going a bit crazy. And the political climate of the country looks no better. We know that the war is coming, and will be terrifying. The people in this movie seem to have a strange hunch about all this terrible possibilities just around the corner. They probably feel there's no hope of stopping the process. They decide to get drunk. To enjoy the last days of a dying world. But the guy might not be going totally crazy after all. He has a plan.