Despair

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.

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.

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.

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..

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.