Despair

(Despair—eine Reise ins Licht). Fassbinder’s first international production, based on a Nabokov novel wittily adapted by Tom Stoppard, Despair is worth rediscovering, and not least for Dirk Bogarde’s sublimely dry performance as a man quite literally beside himself in Berlin in the early 1930s. Hermann, the Russian émigré owner of a chocolate factory, begins experiencing dissociative episodes. And as he sits and watches himself, he is not particularly amused. Not only can Hermann read the political writing on the wall—he sees piles of cast-off little chocolate men—but his beloved if idiotic wife Lydia (Andrea Ferreol) is inexplicably having an affair with her ridiculous cousin Ardalion (Volker Spengler), a struggling artist who is a thinly veiled conformist. Adopting a vagrant as his doppelgänger, Hermann (much like the country around him) embarks on a murder/suicide scheme through which he plans to truly dissociate. Stoppard’s sarcasm is surprisingly apt Fassbinder material: as with chocolates so with life—one can never tell if it is too bitter or not bitter enough, as one searches for the soft center.

—Judy Bloch

• Written by Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by Vladimir Nabokov. Photographed by Michael Ballhaus. With Dirk Bogarde, Andrea Ferreol, Volker Spengler, Klaus Löwitsch. (119 mins, In German with English subtitles, Color, Blu-ray, From Olive Films)