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Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Screenplay by Tom Stoppard...
...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...
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...
...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...
...Rainer Werner Fassbinder, on the goals of young European directors like himself: "We want to find a form that doesn't empty audiences' heads and make them stupid...