Despair
Despair is a 1978 film directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and starring Dirk Bogarde, based on the 1934 novel of the same name by Vladimir Nabokov. It was Fassbinder's first English-language film and was entered into the 1978 Cannes Film Festival.
Plot
Hermann Hermann lives in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. A refugee from Soviet Russia, with a Baltic German father and a wealthy Jewish mother, he has inherited a business making chocolates. His Jewish wife Lydia, voluptuous but not intelligent, has an over-close relationship with her bachelor cousin, a painter called Ardalion. As the Great Depression bites and Nazi thugs start targeting Jewish businesses, with his firm becoming less profitable and Germany less hospitable, Hermann starts dreaming of escape. He already has moments of leaving his body, for example to watch himself making love to his wife, and consults a man he believes to be a Viennese psychiatrist but is in fact a life insurance salesman, who sells Hermann a policy.
Cast
- Adrian Hoven
- Alexander Allerson
- Andréa Ferréol
- Armin Meier
- Bernhard Wicki
- Dirk Bogarde
- Gitty Darugar
- Gottfried John
- Hans Zander
- Hark Bohm
- Harry Baer
- Ingrid Caven
- Isolde Barth
- Klaus Löwitsch
- Liselotte Eder
- Osman Ragheb
- Peter Kern
- Rainer Werner Fassbinder
- Roger Fritz
- Voli Geiler
- Volker Spengler
- Y Sa Lo
More details
| author | Tom Stoppard |
|---|---|
| contentLocation | Berlin |
| director | Rainer Werner Fassbinder |
| editor | Juliane Lorenz Rainer Werner Fassbinder Reginald Beck |
| genre | drama |
| keywords | baltic german contemplating suicide doppelgänger end germany great depression id inherit insurance money insurance salesman jewish jewish mother life insurance moving in nazi paint seclude soviet russia soviet union switzerland twin brother unemployed weimar republic |
| musicBy | Peer Raben |
| publisher | Filmverlag der Autoren New Line Cinema |
| recordedAt | Bavaria |