Imperfect Despair

SELF-CONSCIOUS. Dirk Bogarde's Herman Hermann watches every move he makes through an invisible movie camera. He's constantly framed by windows, doorways, odd rectangular objects. He poses, preens, acts for us. About to make love to his moist, hefty wife, he makes sure that the door of his room is wide open, glancing down the hall where the camera sits. But he never looks into it. He's too professional. Or maybe it isn't there. Or maybe it is. Or maybe this is a screwy movie.

Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder and screenwriter Tom Stoppard have made an interesting attempt to put Vladimir Nabokov's novel Despair on film. Anyone who has read the book might think that reconceiving the story in cinematic terms would be impossible--the tale relies on the reader's acceptance or disbelief of the first-person narrator's word. But Stoppard's conception is genius; only the delivery falls short of the mark.

Tom Stoppard loves playing around with dramatic from: the characters in his plays see themselves as figuratively or literally on a stage. Fassbinder displays a similar interest in form, and a feeling for intricate vision detail to match Stoppard's verbal relish. Match this pair with Nabokov, with his witty, self-conscious prose and playful pokes at literary form and point-of-view, and you have a threesome so finely tuned that they practically exclude the rest of us. Add Dirk Bogarde, one of Britain's most mannered, fastidious actors, and it's no surprise Despair is impenetrable.

Despair is quite an undertaking for a film artist. Herman Hermann is so disatisfied with messy, imperfect reality that he concocts a work of art--the perfect murder--and attempts to immortalize it in the ordered, finite world of a novel he writes. Stoppard's great innovation is that he sees the story not from its uniquely literary angle, but from its general artistic one: Is not cinema an art form, too? Can't movies also be perfectly ordered? And can't movie director, if he chooses, be as selective about the details he presents to the viewer as a novelist to the reader?

One can view Stoppard's conception from the Eisenstein cinematic angle--that film should not aim to recreate reality as it is but as the filmmaker sees it, that the film director should use every cinematic resource to present his vision visually and aurally to to the viewer in such a way that the viewer has no choice but to experience it emotionally. If you accept this line, Despair, with its struggle between life and art, real reality and film reality, could be the quintessential film, almost an apotheosis of cinematic form. Well--it ain't.

Maybe Despair never takes off because Stoppard and Fassbinder differ from Nabokov in a key area: both are extraordinarily fast workers. ("Rainer Werner Fassbinder is thirty-one" the Welles Theater's notes tell us, "and his film credits already outnumber his years"). Once they have this great idea, they don't take the time to figure out how to use it. Herman tells us that he's a movie actor, but a movie actor isn't autonomous. He should be a director, attempting not only to control how we see him, but how we see everything. Often we see Herman from his "own" point-of-view, standing outside himself, and often we appear to see other characters from his perspective too--but what about the scenes where he's not around and doesn't find out what's happened until later? Is it Fassbinder's vision or Herman's? Does Herman have only intermittent directorial control? There are clear-cut fantasy sequences which are obviously Herman's but often it's hard to tell which is which.

Nabokov's novel indicates that Herman can't possibly turn life into art, because life is messy and disordered, and it's got to intrude on his perfect vision--a fitting reason for "despair." Nabokov conveys the idea that Herman's plump wife is having an affair with her puerile cousin without the narrator even being aware of it. And when Herman violently proclaims to have found his "perfect double," a tramp named Felix whom he encounters on a path (in a glass funhouse in a movie), we have our nagging doubts that what Herman tells us he sees really exists. In the film, however, there's never any question: the tramp looks very little like Herman. Fassbinder should have made us doubt, want to believe, almost buy it.

To compound the confusion, the straight "real-life scenes are visually indistinguishable from Heramn's fantasy sequences, sharing the same Art Deco sets, overly-dramatic cuts and music. Some of the scenes have a gauzy quality that suggest fantasy, but a few of these seem to be "real-life too.

AND WHY PLACE the film in Weimar Germany just as the Nazis are gaining popularity? Herman's movie consciousness is slightly anachronistic if he's living in 1930, and the film might just as easily have been set in the present time. Perhaps Stoppard presents these Nazis as a counterpoint to Herman: they also dream of an ordered, perfect world; they also must cruelly destroy to attain it; they also, ultimately, find that there is no final solution in a chaotic universe. Or perhaps they are merely placed in the film as an irritant, imposing further on Herman's vision.

Another problem: In the book we feel strangely close to the admittedly despicable Herman; we perceive him crumbling, and we experience a violent shock when reality and the law close quickly in on him at the end. But the movie keeps its distance. This detatchment could be Bogarde's fault: maybe he's too prim to pull us in the way someone like Alan Bates might have. Or maybe Fassbinder and Stoppard work so hard at distancing us from him physically, framing him, blocking him, giving us a sense of deliberate camera placement, that they forget about bringing him closer at key emotional moments, or building any kind of suspense or anticipation.

Fassbinder has composed Despair beautifully. His technique includes various witty framing devices, quirky angles and long-shots, and inspired fooling around with light sources (especially neat when Herman talks with Felix in a dark hotel room, and swings the hanging lamp so that each of them is lit in turn while the other goes dark). The director cleverly conveys the crack-up of Herman's perfect work of art by placing him beside a shattered mirror, which fragments his image.

IN AN INTERVIEW reprinted by the Welles Theater, Fassbinder discusses Herman's mid-life crisis and "painful search for something that moves." It sounds great on paper, but I don't see it in the movie. I see an elegant, poorly thought-out but often very fascinating film of Despair. Nabokov pulled off a miracle in his novel: we stood outside Herman Hermann and still felt his pain; we experienced his warped vision and still perceived pieces of reality. But neither Nabokov's lucidity nor his despair have made it to the screen.