Despair (1978)

I love this movie so much

Truly Dreadful Film

Thanks for the memories!

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

For starters - I'd say that watching "Despair" was (amongst other things) a very, very, very despairing experience. Very.This 1978 German production was directed by Rainer Fassbinder. And - Let me tell ya - Had "Despair" been a Hollywood production, directed by an American film-maker - Then - You can bet that no one would be heaping praise on it like they are just because this one happens to be a foreign import. It's true.Set in Nazi Germany during the 1930s - I found "Despair" (for the most part) to be a really plodding and senseless mess. In other words - It was a typical "Fassbinder" film.Adapted for the screen from the novel written by Russian author, Vladimir Nabokov - This one's story may have worked well in book format - But, put into the incompetent hands of director, Fassbinder - It totally stank like the reeking stench of rotting sauerkraut. Yep. It really did.

Based on a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, Rainer Fassbinder's "Despair" revolves around Hermann Hermann, a Russian emigrant who owns a chocolate factory in 1930s Berlin.Dull and overly melodramatic, "Despair" finds Hermann maritally, culturally and politically disconnected from everyone and everything around him. Trapped in a cycle of work, sex, drugs and chocolate, which he pushes upon grotesque Germans who block out life with all manners of sweetness, Hermann hatches a plan for escape. How? He will find a body double and fake his own death! Death, he hopes, will offer him solace, will end his despair, will constitute an emancipatory journey toward the light! More specifically, death will allow Hermann to escape his bankrupt company, his ditsy wife, his Jewish identity, an increasingly racist Germany and various bourgeois absurdities. To Hermann, death is freedom! Unsurprisingly, the film is dedicated to three artists - Antonin Artaud, Vincent Van Gogh and Unica Zurn - all of whom committed suicide after severe bouts of depression. "If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself," Artaud said before his death, "but to put myself back together again." Some biographers view "Despair" itself as being vaguely autobiographical, Fassinder, who died of a drug overdose, seeking similar escape.Regardless, "Despair" stars Dirk Bogarde as Hermann Hermann. Klaus Lowitsch plays his double, a man who likewise seeks escape, this time from a life of poverty. Lowitsch would play the lead role in Fassbinder's "World on a Wire", another film in which he plays a double and in which life is seen to be a charade. Both "Wire" and "Despair" also end with their leads locked in what their blissful but now insane minds wrongly believe to be "reality". In "Wire", Lowitsch dances in computer simulated rooms. In "Despair", Bogarde sleeps in a grimy apartment up in the Swiss mountains, believing himself to be a movie actor and life to be an elaborate movie production. Hermann's dislocation and disassociation may be complete, but despair never leaves him.6/10 - See 1962's "Lolita".

What can I say -- watch the film. And don't read the other posters comments -- he didn't like the film, or even bother finishing it but felt compelled to make a list of pointless spoilers in his useless comments.This was Fassbinders shot at 'commercialism', which he failed at entirely (thankfully) but we are left with a thoughtful examination of the boundaries between self awareness and delusion. A metaphor for post war Germany? Who am I to be so pretentious ...Strong performances, provocative script, not a light romp but neither is it a heavy slog. CC

This movie is disturbing. The main character seems to be going a bit crazy. And the political climate of the country looks no better. We know that the war is coming, and will be terrifying. The people in this movie seem to have a strange hunch about all this terrible possibilities just around the corner. They probably feel there's no hope of stopping the process. They decide to get drunk. To enjoy the last days of a dying world. But the guy might not be going totally crazy after all. He has a plan.