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Despair perhaps isn’t yet the most widely known of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s masterpieces, but it’s very likely to soon embrace a well-deserved late glory. A fresh, respectfully restored version will indeed cast a new and warmer light on the actors’ flawless performances and art deco surroundings, preserving in the meantime the movie’s dusky, suggestive and sinister penumbra. Dirk Bogarde is Mr. Hermann Hermann, a Russian émigré and chocolate entrepreneur in the Berlin of the 1930s, with a softly naive wife and baroquely ways to spend his time, who slowly begins to taste the unpleasant bitterness of an existential nausea his sugary business can’t save him from. The precarious political atmosphere at the dawn of the Third Reich melts with Hermann’s own unbalanced psychology and a profusion of fancy mirrors and google-moogle glasses masterfully reflects his shattering personality. Wandering the perilous themes of alienation, dissociation and the double, Fassbinder’s film is inspired by a Nabokov novel and dedicated to the unquiet, wonderfully inspired souls of Van Gogh, Antonin Artaud and the German painter Unica Zurn. Its brightened up, Blu-ray edition previewed this morning at Le Nouveau Latina in Paris, and is set to be released in theaters on March 28, 2012.

Later,
Silvia Bombardini