Despair (1978) User Reviews

Well worth seeing -- don't read the other posters spoilers

[crazy_canuck-1 · 8/10 · 28 September 2006]

What can I say -- watch the film. And don't read the other posters comments -- he didn't like the film, or even bother finishing it but felt compelled to make a list of pointless spoilers in his useless comments.

This was Fassbinders shot at 'commercialism', which he failed at entirely (thankfully) but we are left with a thoughtful examination of the boundaries between self awareness and delusion. A metaphor for post war Germany? Who am I to be so pretentious ...

Strong performances, provocative script, not a light romp but neither is it a heavy slog.

CC

Fassbinder + Nabokov + Dirk Bogarde = the poetry of the psychotic break

[kurtralske · 8/10 · 28 June 2020]

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.

Left me unmoved and uninvolved

[howard.schumann · 7/10 · 23 November 2003]

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.

Interesting and always ambitious but ultimately flawed interpretation.

[christopher-underwood · 7/10 · 25 August 2020]

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.

Seashells and Clergymen

[tieman64 · 28 February 2014]

Based on a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, Rainer Fassbinder's "Despair" revolves around Hermann Hermann, a Russian emigrant who owns a chocolate factory in 1930s Berlin.

Dull and overly melodramatic, "Despair" finds Hermann maritally, culturally and politically disconnected from everyone and everything around him. Trapped in a cycle of work, sex, drugs and chocolate, which he pushes upon grotesque Germans who block out life with all manners of sweetness, Hermann hatches a plan for escape. How? He will find a body double and fake his own death! Death, he hopes, will offer him solace, will end his despair, will constitute an emancipatory journey toward the light! More specifically, death will allow Hermann to escape his bankrupt company, his ditsy wife, his Jewish identity, an increasingly racist Germany and various bourgeois absurdities. To Hermann, death is freedom! Unsurprisingly, the film is dedicated to three artists - Antonin Artaud, Vincent Van Gogh and Unica Zurn - all of whom committed suicide after severe bouts of depression. "If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself," Artaud said before his death, "but to put myself back together again." Some biographers view "Despair" itself as being vaguely autobiographical, Fassinder, who died of a drug overdose, seeking similar escape.

Regardless, "Despair" stars Dirk Bogarde as Hermann Hermann. Klaus Lowitsch plays his double, a man who likewise seeks escape, this time from a life of poverty. Lowitsch would play the lead role in Fassbinder's "World on a Wire", another film in which he plays a double and in which life is seen to be a charade. Both "Wire" and "Despair" also end with their leads locked in what their blissful but now insane minds wrongly believe to be "reality". In "Wire", Lowitsch dances in computer simulated rooms. In "Despair", Bogarde sleeps in a grimy apartment up in the Swiss mountains, believing himself to be a movie actor and life to be an elaborate movie production. Hermann's dislocation and disassociation may be complete, but despair never leaves him.

6/10 - See 1962's "Lolita".

Interesting but not a major Fassbinder film

[JuguAbraham · 6/10 · 27 March 2020]

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..

Visually stunning, masterfully acted, brilliantly directedadaptation of a complex Nabokov novella.

[mo-20 · 10/10 · 29 January 2000]

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.

Troubling art piece

[Classic-Movie-Club · 7/10 · 10 December 2019]

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.

The Light of Darkness

[semiotechlab-658-95444 · 10/10 · 12 February 2010]

R. W. Fassbinder's first film with an international crew has in the German version the subtitle "Eine Reise Ins Licht" / "A Trip into the Light". If someone desires to know where this astonishing subtitle comes from, he usually gets the answer that Fassbinder meant Hermann Hermanns trip into the land of his release, and actually, the movie itself does little to prove that this assumption may be misleading: it shows pictures in which Hermann unifies with his wife Lydia at the border of the Brienzer- or Thunersee, they look like exactly the light-creatures at the Urdasee at the end of E. T. A. Hoffmann's "Medardus". However, these light-figures also switch, and we realize that Hermann Hermann is exchanged with his "double" Felix Weber whom he had chosen to kill because of his alleged similarity with Hermann in order to cash the insurance money that he was hoping to get from Orlovius because his chocolate factory is bankrupt.

So far the outlines of the story. However, one of the most intriguing facts is that "Despair" can be watched in several quite different ways. Taken from outside, it can be seen as a movie about the Russian immigrant H. H., married to his stupid chocolate-binging wife L., having been always a stranger in Germany and going to loose now his company in the beginning of the Nazi era. While he is seriously brooding if the color of the chocolate has similarity with the Nazi uniform and whether the "bitterness" of his Pralinees fits to the Tausendjähriges Reich, he starts to see himself while he is having sex with his wife. In the cinema he sits behind himself, and the movie brings him to the fatal idea to escape bankruptcy by entering a life policy and kill his Doppelganger. However, Hermann does not realize anymore that the man whom he sees, i.e. His real Doppelganger, does not exist outside of his projective brain, he goes out and meets the fairground man Felix who has nothing in common with himself but who is considered by Hermann as his twin-brother.

From this point in the movie on, Hermann Hermann starts his "Trip into the Light", and more and more the audience should become clear, that the use of the word "light" by Fassbinder has nothing to do with the usual metaphoric sense of "light" in the sense of "releaf", but is changed into his opposite. Moreover, Fassbinder uses the light here in addition also in a concrete sense, insofar as he shows the place where Hermann's trips ends as a brightly illuminated Swiss Alpine mountain village. This is by the way programmed: We see a picture of the very same village already at the beginning of the movie, it hangs on the wall in the restaurant, where Hermann and Orlovius meet for the first time. The contradiction to the comforting light in the long tradition from the Bible to Bonaventura becomes now suddenly brutally perverted, when we see Hermann at the end more or less imprisoned in his small, dark hotel room with closed shades, sitting at the edge of his bed like a parcel ready to be picked up and telling the police which is coming to arrest him that he is just an actor and will get out of here.

Finally, we realize that Fassbinder has created with "Despair" a gigantic anti-Bonaventuran Metaphysics of Darkness, his light being the misleading light at the end of the tunnel which Hermann enters at last when he sees himself doubling his individuality. Only in this interpretation of the light as negative pol, but in no ways in the literal interpretation of the light as positive pole, we understand why "Despair" is dedicated to Antonin Artaud, Vincent van Gogh and Unica Zürn, who all ended their light by suicide, thus traditionally spoken in darkness and not relieved by the light of god who explicitly forbids self-killing. The famous sunflower-fields of Van Gogh, the strenght of the theater of cruelty and the opium-illuminations of Artaud, the Zürn's anagrams by aid of which she pressed sense out of combinatorics --- they all are witnesses of a revolutionary new paring of light with the ethical category of Bad and of darkness with the ethical category of Good, and thus the subversion of the logical and ethical correspondences. Was Fassbinder inspired by an often overseen sentence in Unica Zürn's main work "The Man in the Jasmin": "And then I jumped into the light and started to watch myself"?

Despair is the perfect way to describe this film!

[planktonrules · 3/10 · 1 April 2021]

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.

Insanity is a Trip into the Light

[hasosch · 10/10 · 27 July 2006]

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.

Gabby-Gabby-Gabby German Cinema

[strong-122-478885 · 4/10 · 1 January 2018]

For starters - I'd say that watching "Despair" was (amongst other things) a very, very, very despairing experience. Very.

This 1978 German production was directed by Rainer Fassbinder. And - Let me tell ya - Had "Despair" been a Hollywood production, directed by an American film-maker - Then - You can bet that no one would be heaping praise on it like they are just because this one happens to be a foreign import. It's true.

Set in Nazi Germany during the 1930s - I found "Despair" (for the most part) to be a really plodding and senseless mess. In other words - It was a typical "Fassbinder" film.

Adapted for the screen from the novel written by Russian author, Vladimir Nabokov - This one's story may have worked well in book format - But, put into the incompetent hands of director, Fassbinder - It totally stank like the reeking stench of rotting sauerkraut. Yep. It really did.

Subtle and brilliant world

[Krystine-3 · 10/10 · 2 July 2007]

Wonderful pattern of REAL ART-film for me.

I suppose Fassbinnder showed very precisely here, the difference between artistic reality and rough and dull one, maybe they can penetrate each other, but eventually that's impossible for the first to exist, when the second is becoming aggressive. As I read, Hermann of Nabokov in the novel "Despair" is a kind of artist. Fassbinnder based his film on this moment as I understood: he dedicated the film to Van Gogh and other artists.

Marvelous world of Hermann's house with sweet and funny (like chocolate?!) Hermann's wife Lydia and her brother Ardalion (amazing red-haired and red-bearded Russian, in highest extent picturesque and grotesque but exquisite image of how-Europeans-imagine-Russians). This candy paradise is being eaten by insatiable and horror monster.But who is that monster or what is that monster, I think, here are many variations. Hermann's artistic and refined mind itself, which created all this splendor before, may be. Or banal savage real-life of barracks, from which Hermann wants to escape at the end of film.

Many things in the film are flying above the ground. Like Nabokov's butterflies: main characters - Hermann and relatives, exquisite absurd humor, locations of house, restaurant, even Hermann choco factory in lilac color, holiday at the lake (Ardalion - mermaid man :))). Stepping on the ground are only awful bearded and haired Felix - double-ganger, as usual Nazi-men in the streets, detectives-noir.

Dirk Bogarde, yet more slim and dry as never before, as a new-level reincarnation of his previous morbid and fatal characters in cinema, finally becomes quite abstract figure. And it's a brilliant zenith of his long and complex actor career as I think.

Yet I'd add that Despair is a great example of how can make films about artists - sparkling but not heavy-weighted costume biopics.

An entertaining enigma of a movie

[meathookcinema · 8/10 · 21 November 2020]

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.

Strange brew

[m67165 · 4 June 2003]

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.