Customer Reviews

Despair [VHS]

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This isn't as laugh out loud funny as Nabokov's late 1950's masterpiece Lolita. Despair, as the title suggests, is a novel(and film) about Despair. And yet there are certain similarities. Both films are about a highly refined Russian exile living among crass bourgeoisie. Also both Lolita and Despair have lead characters who have double names. Lolita has Humbert Humbert & Despair Hermann Hermann. The double name suggests among other things the way exiles live a kind of double life--one part of their selves hopelessly lost in an irrevocable past and the other desperately trying to assimilate into a foreign culture that despite ones efforts remains foreign. Nabokov's characters never give up their past, in fact they prefer it to a present that simply cannot measure up. And this division almost always ends in tragedy.

In Despair(which is an English language film directed by a German director) Dirk Bogarde(Hermann) plays a Rusian born chocolate manufacturer living in exile in 1930's Berlin just as the Nazis are coming to power. The first words we hear are Hermann's fond reminiscences of his mother Russia. Hermann is immaculately attired and he speaks with fondness of all the refined things in life like literature but he is surrounded by people including his wife who read pulp novels and oddly, ironically, and perhaps appropriately enough Hermanns life begins more and more to resemble one of those pulp novels. Like Kubrick(who directed Lolita) Fassbinder has a perfect feel for Nabokovian black comedy. Hermann's "despair" at films beginning has already evolved to the point where he begins to disassociate from himself and in a very funny scene he confesses his fears to a man who looks remarkably like Freud and who he assumes to be a psychoanalyst but who, it turns out, is merely an insurance salesman. The plot revolves around Hermanns film noir inspired plan to have his despairing half murdered so that he can begin living again. Hermann does committ his convoluted "murder". And from then on the film follows Hermann to ever more remote Swiss villages in his quest to escape himself. A rare kind of film that is funny, sharp, and moving sometimes all at the same time.

If you want fun and games don't watch this film. As the title suggests, it is not for the faint hearted. Dirk Bogarde was the right actor to portray the outwardly calm, successful business man, who rapidly helter-skeltered into despair, and madness. Sir Dirk has only to raise an eyebrow, shed a tear for you to be on his side. His instinctive acting hold you spellbound, throughly absorbed in his geninus. If you want to see a great film, try and find this movie. It is rare at the moment, but is due to be released as a re-mastered dvd in the summer.