Fassbinder: Despair (1978)

Adapted from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel by Tom Stoppard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s only English film displays a bizarre, surreal mix of influences and styles. A period drama revolving around a Russian exile, Hermann Karlovich (Dirk Bogarde), who sets himself up as a chocolate manufacturer in Weimar Germany, it feels confected more than directed, as Fassbinder crafts a series of pedantically partitioned micro-spaces, minute distinctions in spatial flavour. Most of his mise-en-scenes are compartmentalised to at least four or five subsidiary zones and lit by at least four or five sources and colours of light, which are then reflected and refracted through a kaleidoscopic sea of glass, mirrors and fabric. Even when there is a single source of light, it flickers or oscillates, or the camera circles it too quickly for it to orient or anchor what it’s illuminating, while the camera’s own movements are similarly compartmentalised, as Fassbinder wraps hushed, subliminal zooms in baroque tracking-shots, surrounding those, in turn, with orchestral, circular pans. As a result, there’s such a wealth of internal montage that regular montage and linear editing starts to feel incongruous or irrelevant – the mise-en-scenes are so cluttered that they almost feel superimposed, perhaps explaining why Hermann attempts to escape from this constrictive, cloistered world through a kind of psychological superimposition, dissociating from himself by claiming to have found his double in a local tramp, even though nobody else can really see the resemblance. Most of the film follows this obsession, as Hermann attempts to commune with the tramp in ever more extreme ways, until it feels as if he – and the film – is literally trying to occupy two spaces at once, producing a kind of schizoid space that works well against the rise of Nazi doublethink, but also often feels like a meditation on bisexuality, especially given Bogarde’s history and his character’s fateful, final words. Culminating, in true paranoid gothic fashion, with a murder “that happened but was never committed, a murder where the victim did it,” it’s a stunning example of how melodrama can subliminally shift into science fiction, as Fassbinder mines the Weimar period for all its lost futures, the exact moment before expressionism hardened and migrated into noir.