Word: stoppard
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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...
...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...
...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...