216. Despair

Song - Als Het Vuur Gedoofd Is (Acda en De Munnik)

Movie: Despair (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978)

I am unfamiliar with the Vladimir Nabokov novel this is adapted from, but I have read Lolita and some of his short stories. I've loved all of it, and find his cheerfully self-aware existentialism to be very much in my wheelhouse. Fassbinder evokes that really well here, vividly portraying both the personal demons and the societial disarray haunting Herman (Dirk Bogarde), without forgetting that Herman is a fictional character in a fictional story. Fassbinder, like Nabokov, knows that ultimately nothing but his own aesthetic choices will define how we perceive Herman, and fully delights in making these choices and signaling them to the audience. Dirk Bogarde is on the same page, choosing to act as arch and mannered as he possibly can at any given moment. It's a hugely entertaining performance, filled with elaborated gestures and wonderfully embellished dialogue. Bogarde often has to perform in situations that don't make sense of their own, without the stylisations of Fassbinder. He has to anticipate that a cut, a camera movement or the wonderful, often bordering on facetious, score will contextualise what's going on. He is also very often semi-obscured by, or seen through, windows and mirrors, a thematically relevant, but slightly overused, choice here. 

I had not seen a Fassbinder or Bogarde film before. It's both easy to see why they have been canonised as great artists and why Despair is usually not listed among their greatest works. Herman is the owner of a chocolate business in 1930's Berllin. He is also a Russian immigrant with Jewish roots, correctly suspecting that his wife is cheating on him with her dim cousin. As a result, Herman is experiencing dissociation and is obsessed with finding his doppelganger to take his identity. He eventually convinces himself he has found one (not even close, as Fassbinder constantly highlights) and plots the perfect murder, which of course turns out to be less than perfect. This exploration of Herman's mental state doesn't go anywhere unusual, either narratively, or psychologically, even if Fassbinder keeps things lively with ocassional asides into premonitions and potential alternate realities. 

Yet this slightness is also what makes the film quite interesting. Fassbinder (I suppose inspired by Nabokov) deliberately minimises Herman, turning him into a fairly inconsequential person. From an outsider perspective, his most momentous act (the murder of a random nobody) is so badly and uninterestingly executed, and of so little importance, it will at most raise the eyebrow of a semi-interested newspaper reader before being forgotten. Nobody in the film acts as if being a distressed Russian Jew in 1930's Berlin is of great historical or societal importance. Herman's Nazi-uniform wearing underling in the chocolate factory is presented similarly. As much as possible Fassbinder tries to see Germany in the 1930's from the perspective of someone living there at the time. He shows people debating politics and being concerned about extremist stances, but he doesn't let his characters betray any awareness of living through a grave historic moment.  

In the film's best scene, Herman is sitting in a bar outside when across the street a number of brownshirts throw bricks through the windows of a Jewish shop. Two Jews playing chess in Herman's bar look up from their game, and continue playing after the brief distraction. Passersby briefly (or not) take a look at the broken window, and go on with their daily lives. Even the store owners themselves don't make a scene, but take a broom, clean their entryway and get back into the shop. A couple scenes later (it's not always clear how much time has passed between scenes), Herman returns to the same bar. Thr chess table is now occupied by two non-Jewish Germans.