Uma Viagem para a Luz

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.

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.

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.

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.