Doubled Up

By John Skow

DESPAIR

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Screenplay by Tom Stoppard

It is quite possible to attend Despair in the wrong frame of mind, having worked one's emotions into shape for piano moving, so to speak, only to find that there is nothing heavier than a seltzer bottle or a nightgown being lifted. Despair is, in fact, a light and lavender comedy about a crazed Russian emigre named Hermann Hermann, who watches in amazement as his mind splits like his name, into two equal parts. The film is set in Berlin. Based on a 1936 novel written in Russian by Vladimir Nabokov, it is hopeless in mood, but most cheerfully so. Nabokov once pointed out in print that the novel is devoid of message, ideas or Freudian "Wiener schnitzel dreams." The despair of the title therefore may only have been that of the penniless young ex patriate author who supported himself by giving tennis lessons and no doubt feared that he would have to go on saying "Smotrina myachik" (Keep your eye on the ball) for the rest of his life.

The gifted German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder hired Playwright Tom Stoppard, author of that Nabokovian whimsy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, to adapt Despair for the screen. Except for one grave lapse, he has done so effectively and with suitable reverence, and Fassbinder has assembled a first-rate cast.

Dirk Bogarde, looking natty and nerve-worn, is exactly right as the fissured Hermann, a chocolate manufacturer whose business has turned bitter. Explaining how he inherited the family business, he says, "My mother's dowry was her weight in gold coins. They proved to be chocolate. My father died of grief, my mother of diabetes."

Hermann has other problems, as he explains to a weighty fellow whom he takes to be a psychiatrist but who is in fact an insurance agent. He is troubled by an odd sort of sexual dislocation: when he is making love to his wife (a porky and bubbleheaded blonde played delightfully by Andrea Ferreol), he also seems to be sitting in a chair and watching the heavings. Worse, as the illness progresses, the chair he watches, from recedes farther and farther from the action.

Thoughtfully, Hermann takes out an insurance policy. As it happens, he has met a poor carnival worker who seems to him to be his exact double, though in fact -- and Nabokov's smile can be discerned here -- there is no resemblance between the two men. Undeterred by reality and convinced that fate has handed him a chance at the perfect crime, Hermann changes clothes with the fellow, then shoots him, intending to collect on the in surance policy through his wife and live blissfully ever after.

Fassbinder, whose first big-budget film and first film in English this is, gives an appropriate quality of ponderous slap stick to the first half of the movie. There is a lot of blubbery smooching between Hermann's wife and her lascivious cousin, a bulky red-bearded artist (Volker Spengler). Hermann ignores this, but giggles apprehensively about the infant Nazi Party: "The National Socialists are against the Socialists and also against the Nationalists." In an odd scene witnessed by the distracted chocolate manufacturer, Brownshirts throw bricks at the shopwindow of a Jewish butcher, but the bricks do not seem to shatter the glass.

The working-out of the crime has the mannered artificiality of an Agatha Christie thriller, which seems surprisingly like Nabokov's own mannered artificiality. The only blunder comes at the end. The police have surrounded the alpine chalet where Hermann is hiding. In the book, his mania produces the possibility of a brilliant escape. He yells to the crowd of onlookers, "Frenchmen! This is a rehearsal ... A famous film actor will presently come running out of this house. He is an archcriminal, but he must escape Hold those policemen, knock them down, sit on them -- we pay them for it." In the movie he says these lines, but, un accountably, only after he has been captured, when the old master's marvelous conceit has lost its point.

-- John Skow

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