As the owner of a chocolate factory, Hermann Hermann (Dirk Bogarde) enjoys all the luxury of a high-style bourgeois life, but in reality, it shows up merely as a facade, because his factory stays before bankruptcy, and his wife Lydia (Andréa Ferréol) has a liaison with her brother-in-law, the painter Ardalion (Volker Spengler). Hermann Hermann starts to doubt everything, and eventually he realizes, that this bit of life, that lies still before him, will be wasted in any case to a hopeless struggle against these doubts. His meeting with the sleeping hobo Felix Weber (Klaus Löwitsch) as a picture of the death can be seen as birth of the idea to stage a sudden accident, in order to cash a high sum of insurance money. In exchanging his outer appearance, Hermann Hermann believes to be capable of transcending the borders of his life and to be able to start a new one. Hermann Hermann has a totally emotionless relation to the death, because it is the death of the other and for him a necessary act to commence a new life. The radical moment lies in the fact of the penetration into another life, whose border to one's own life is a big as the border between the Here and the Beyond.
The whole movie is characterized by objects and persons, who have their counterparts and mirror images, respectively. For Fassbinder, glass walls were borders, through which one could look through form the one side and which were opaque from the other. While the mirrors in Nabokov's novel stay opaque, Fassbinder creates with his glass labyrinths transparency, allows the sight into the Beyond, and dissolves the hermetic presentation. "Despair" produces a visual bridge between the two worlds: In Fassbinder's film, the borders between the Here and the Beyond start to merge into one another, while Nabokov underlines the closeness of both worlds. Not only is Hermann Hermann himself observing subject, but he is also the object of observation. In view of this perception, the world, in which there is no border anymore between subject and object turns strange and menacing. With the disappearance of the projected Ego also the process of self-dissolution announces itself, that ends with the real Ego being at the end not anymore identical to itself and the dissociation of the personality being complete. But Hermann Hermann's plan fails, because his fatal idea of the similarity between him and Felix Weber is at last the product of his sick fantasy. The hero is becoming the victim of his own deformed perception. Sitting in a hotel room, he finally writes his own story. At the end, the "trip into the light", as the German title of the movie is named, ends with the darkness of Hermann Hermann's mind in a bright Alpine mountain village, when he gets fully insane and considers the reality to be a movie, whose director he is and whose acting he is able to control.
There can be no doubt, that this is not only Fassbinder's best movie, but one of the top ten movies made ever. Rating: 10 Points.
The whole movie is characterized by objects and persons, who have their counterparts and mirror images, respectively. For Fassbinder, glass walls were borders, through which one could look through form the one side and which were opaque from the other. While the mirrors in Nabokov's novel stay opaque, Fassbinder creates with his glass labyrinths transparency, allows the sight into the Beyond, and dissolves the hermetic presentation. "Despair" produces a visual bridge between the two worlds: In Fassbinder's film, the borders between the Here and the Beyond start to merge into one another, while Nabokov underlines the closeness of both worlds. Not only is Hermann Hermann himself observing subject, but he is also the object of observation. In view of this perception, the world, in which there is no border anymore between subject and object turns strange and menacing. With the disappearance of the projected Ego also the process of self-dissolution announces itself, that ends with the real Ego being at the end not anymore identical to itself and the dissociation of the personality being complete. But Hermann Hermann's plan fails, because his fatal idea of the similarity between him and Felix Weber is at last the product of his sick fantasy. The hero is becoming the victim of his own deformed perception. Sitting in a hotel room, he finally writes his own story. At the end, the "trip into the light", as the German title of the movie is named, ends with the darkness of Hermann Hermann's mind in a bright Alpine mountain village, when he gets fully insane and considers the reality to be a movie, whose director he is and whose acting he is able to control.
There can be no doubt, that this is not only Fassbinder's best movie, but one of the top ten movies made ever. Rating: 10 Points.