Despair

Some movies are easy to admire and hard to like, particularly those of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The prolific German director had made 31 movies by the age of 31; next up was his first English-language work, Despair. Based on a Russian-langauge novel by Vladimir Nabokov, the screenplay was crafted by Tom Stoppard. The lead role was another cinematic gift from Europe for the super-expressive eyes of Dirk Bogarde.

Bogarde's character, Harmann Herman, is a Russian chocolate tycoon living in pre-Nazi Berlin with a wife (French actress Andrea Ferreol, still working now after 167 movie/TV credits) who's having an affair with her failed-artist cousin (Volker Spengler, a Fassbinder regular). They and most other characters speak English in naturally thick Germanic accents or, in Bogarde's case, with a wide-ranging European accent.

Herman, whose double name is a typical Nabokovian clue to his personality disorder, is going mad, observing himself critically, craving a new existence, then planning to create it by murdering a tramp (Klaus Lowitsch) he wrongly thinks is his doppelganger.

Superb photography and production designs play with an audience's mind through mirrors, reflections and illusions. Berlin-born cinematographer Michael Ballhaus won Oscar nominations for Broadcast News, The Fabulous Baker Boys and Gangs of New York, and also worked for Scorsese on Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence and The Departed. For this glittering work, he only collected a top award in Germany. Restored handsomely in Bavaria in 2011, the movie's DVD version glows with OTT colouring, especially for Herman's lilac-tinted chocolate factory. As usual, wherever Fassbinder looked, he found exquisite angles and heavy-handed symbolism in his recurrent visions of unbared German psyches and naked plump actresses.

The narrative is dotted with intellectual Stoppard lines. For a stage play, the director and cast would know how much time an audience would need to recognise, comprehend and appreciate a quote-worthy sentence's wisdom and wit. On film, no director wants to insert artificial pauses and disrupt a movie's pace, resulting in the screenplay's occasional brain-teasing thoughts slipping past, possibly improperly heard (the restoration warranted optional English subtitles).

Not that there's a steady narrative flow. Nabokov's formulaic characters perform symbolic scenes, the movie surging in fits and starts, relying heavily on Bogarde's face, and striking lighting of it, to hold an audience's attention. The stagey story might have worked better on screen if it had been filmed in German.