“The perfect murder is the one where the victim did it”

For all his idiosyncrasies, we can never accuse Rainer Werner Fassbinder for being unoriginal, as evident by many of his most unique and often divisive works. His only English-language film stands as one of his most interesting achievements – and in it, he’s working with a motley crew of collaborators drawn from numerous different arenas, such as Vladimir Nabokov (who wrote the novel on which this film was based), Tom Stoppard (who adapted the original text) and Dirk Bogarde, who continued to prove himself as one of Europe’s most interesting actors, even when everything about this film seems so different from what he was known to do. Despair is a tricky film – it doesn’t come up in many discussions on the director’s work, and even setting aside his enormously prolific output over the course of less than a two decades, it’s difficult to not view it as something of a failure at a superficial level. However, Despair is by no means a bad film – if anything, it’s one of Fassbinder’s most interesting experiments, a chance for him to momentarily step out of his comfort zone and instead explore a number of other interesting avenues in the process, which may not be as successful as some of his more notable work, but still carries a certain charm that doesn’t abate, just like in his masterpieces. Inarguably, this is a film that will be vastly enjoyed more by those who are accustomed to the director’s work and are looking to venture deeper (it’s one of the films I’d certainly not recommend first for anyone looking to get into Fassbinder), but even without the foreknowledge of what the director was capable of, there’s a sheen of enigmatic grandeur that persists throughout Despair, keeping it engaging and insightful, even when it doesn’t feel particularly free of shortcomings.

Somewhere in industrial Germany resides Hermann Hermann (Dirk Bogarde), a man of indeterminate origins, with his general claim being that he’s the immigrant son of an impoverished Russian father and a Polish mother who had her roots in the European aristocracy. He inherited a chocolate factory, which he isn’t particularly enamoured with, but still runs with an iron-fist, hoping to produce good quality product, in the hopes that he can make a fortune. However, beneath his veneer of elegance sits a very insecure, broken man who is lost in life – and it doesn’t help that he is gradually losing his mind, to the point where he starts to believe that he has found his doppelgänger (Klaus Löwitsch), a poor street artist and vagabond who catches Hermann’s attention one afternoon, convincing him that he has found his exact double. The problem is, Hermann is the only person who believes Felix looks anything like him – but this doesn’t stop his plan to murder his new acquaintance, lead everyone to believe that it was him who was the victim, and subsequently retreat to the idyllic villages of Switzerland, where he can live in peace with his dimwitted wife, Lydia (Andréa Ferréol). He hatches an elaborate plan to execute this ambitious mission, enlisting the help of his wife’s sinister cousin, Ardalion (Volker Spengler) to create a situation where all doubt that Hermann was the victim of his own murderous actions would be removed, and replaced with nothing but certainty. Somehow, in the midst of all this scheming, Hermann never once realizes that the world doesn’t operate in the way he believes it does, and that reality is far more prominent than he would like to believe.

Describing the plot of Despair seems like a fool’s errand, since it is such a scattershot, absurd storyline, no coherent narrative could do it justice. However, this is all part of the experience of seeing this film, which seems oddly aligned to Fassbinder’s most bold stylistic cravings, to the point where it becomes almost intrinsically his own, despite the presence of various other figures that play significant roles in bringing Nabokov’s story to the screen. Situating this film within a particular genre is just as difficult – partially a psychological thriller and deeply-unsetting dark comedy, with heavy overtures of sinister absurdism, it’s a profoundly surreal work that is impossible to pin down in any meaningful way. However, much like the best of Fassbinder’s work, categorization has very little place in Despair, which ventures further and goes far deeper than you’d think based on its premise. How else can we explain a story of an insecure chocolatier falling apart when he believes that he has found his exact double without expecting something conventional? Traditions have never been a factor in Fassbinder’s work, and as he was nearing the phase of his career where he was supremely comfortable to experiment with the form, Despair feels like both an enormous departure, and a wildly impressive work of prowess from a director who may not have been defined by a particular set of quirks, but certainly wasn’t afraid to extract from his well of rich, interesting ideas (both narratively and in terms of visual panache) in realizing this story, which would not have been nearly as interesting had it not been shepherded by a director who often appeared to be the epitome of intrepid, delightfully perverted artistry in its most distilled, unquestionably poignant form.

The literary roots of this film are not absent from Fassbinder’s vision – there are numerous moments where prominent artists are mentioned, amongst them being Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose seminal work, The Double, was most certainly an inspiration, both on the original text of Despair, and Fassbinder’s realization of it. The concept of the double in cinema has a rich and storied history – from the earliest days of the silent era, right to the present moment, various artists have been intent on exploring the inner anxiety of realizing that we may not be as unique as we think we are. This is often summarized in many formative texts on modernism (particularly those that look at the sense of angst that comes with the hyper-realization of the self) in the popular maxim of turning a corner and being confronted not with a stranger, but with oneself, a mirror image that reflects who we are, without being us. It’s not the easiest set of ideas, and there is a great deal of psychological inquiry that often plays a part in these discussions – but Fassbinder does exceptionally well in realizing these ideas in a manner that feels authentic and faithful to the text, but most importantly, carries a sense of actually being interested in the story it’s telling. It’s not enough to just create an absurd plot of a man believing he’s found his double (when the audience and every other character in the film knows this isn’t true), and calling it a work of psychologically-dense fiction – there needs to be something else keeping us engaged, and Fassbinder finds the hideous core of this premise quite consistently, working closely with Stoppard’s adaptation and extracting every potential piece of enigmatic emotional resonance from an already impenetrable premise that is only made more compelling through the artists’ superb approach to the challenging material.

Ultimately, everything about this film came down to how the actors interpreted it, and if there was any reason for Despair to be seen by as wide an audience as possible, its the performance given by Dirk Bogarde. I’m not quite sure what Bogarde was doing in this film, but whatever we can define his performance as, he’s fully committed to it. An actor of such remarkable stature, it isn’t clear what drove him to collaborate with Fassbinder, who may have been enchanted by Hollywood and its stars, but rarely managed to wrangle many of them into actually working for him. As one of the preeminent thespians of his day, Bogarde was an odd fit for the director’s world – but this was purely a theoretical concern, since everything the actor is doing works brilliantly. He seems plucked directly from the pages of many of Fassbinder’s most perverted satires, playing one of his quintessential antiheroes that may be bordering on despicable, but at the very least manages to keep us engaged. Bogarde frequently put every bit of effort he could muster into his work, and his performance as the ambiguously-named Hermann Hermann may not see him reach the peaks he was known for, but still finds him doing work that proves he was one of the industry’s most unheralded stars. Navigating the boundary between major screen presence and reliable character actor, he’s fully dedicated to the role, and finds a certain vague charm underneath a truly deplorable character. It’s difficult to conceive of any actor doing Hermann more justice than Bogarde, since so much of what makes him memorable comes from some of the actor’s deliberate choices – and the result is a performance that ties the film together, and gives it the necessary boost of life. Without it, Despair would’ve been an aimless series of nonsensical moments that lead to very little. He is the lifeblood of the film, and makes every moment worth watching in his own way.

Fassbinder’s world isn’t one that we tend to venture into if we aren’t fully equipped, since despite being a stunning array of provocative stories and gorgeous visuals, there are occasions when it can shock more than it can please, which is most certainly true for Despair. By all means, this is a lesser work – it doesn’t have the same deeply compelling emotional resonance as some of the director’s more notable work, and it carries a vitriolic sense of humour that can be bewildering for even the best of us. However, if we look beneath this and focus on the ideas he is dealing with directly, it’s not difficult to see the intrinsic brilliance underpinning the film. Consider the major theme of identity – doubles are not unknown to literature, and they often make for thrilling storytelling. However, in this film, we’re presented with a man who is truly delusional when he encounters someone who he is convinced is his doppelgänger, despite not having any resemblance. It opens up a discussion on the role of individuality, and the intersections between our own crises of identity and how we assert it onto the world around us. It’s a challenging and very daring concept, and if anyone was going to convincingly tinker in this sandbox of ideas, it was going to be Fassbinder, who quite masterfully constructs a daring portrait of a man gradually losing his mind. It’s not on-brand for the director, who mastered these kinds of narratives, and a bold departure that shows how capable he was even in an entirely different language. It’s not a film without its flaws, but these can easily be rectified with a more active understanding of what he was attempting to do here – and ultimately, he created a work that is, for better or worse, entirely unforgettable in its own unique way.