DVD Watch

Despair

Olive Films, $29.95 (Blu-ray)

Anyone who looks to pedigree for proof of a movie's significance would be at a loss to find a film quite as impressive as Despair. This 1978 absurdist black comedy of schizophrenia and alienation was adapted by Tom Stoppard from a novel by Vladimir Nabokov and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the great provocateur/humanist of the New German Cinema who made more than 40 films before losing a fight with cocaine and sleeping pills in 1982 at the tender age of 37. The English-language Despair is Fassbinder distilled: a phantasmagoric journey through the life of a man split in two by mental illness and the burden of history. Hermann Hermann (played by the great British actor and former matinee idol Dirk Bogarde) is a Russian émigré living in Germany in the early Thirties whose alienation, paranoia, and insanity parallel the descent of his adopted country into the madness and violence of the Third Reich. Fassbinder, who never missed a chance to explore the aesthetic varieties of psychological disassociation or expose the dark past and bourgeoisie hypocrisy of his homeland, once again pulls off the remarkable trick of exposing the harshest truths about the human condition and his own little political corner of it by means of the most theatrical, contrived, and abstracted tableaux. Quietly succumbing to his and his country's inner turmoil, Hermann comes to imagine himself outside his own body – placidly watching himself make love to his absurdly zaftig wife, a woman whose fleshly emptiness speaks to the blind self-delusion of the early Nazi age – before hatching a doomed plan to kill the man he assumes, against all appearances, to be his double. Artsy, self-indulgent, and full of anti-naturalist arthouse bravura (Michael Ballhaus' camera slides through scenes like an obtrusive yet poetic machine, demanding attention), Fassbinder's film is both a tragedy of pain-filled self-awareness and an absurdist comedy of historical and existential inevitability: Hermann will go mad just as surely as the Nazis will rise to power in Germany. In Fassbinder's world, moral and psychological failure are fait accompli, and the yawning abyss is the inevitable fate of those who lose their way. Dedicated to three artists – Vincent van Gogh, Antonin Artaud, and Unica Zürn – who are as famous for their madness as their output, Despair is a masterpiece of resignation and moral detachment – which may be the only reasonable responses to a world gone totally mad.

Coming Soon ...

12 Angry Men (Criterion, $29.95): The most fun one could have sitting in a single steaming-hot room for 96 minutes with no women around, Sidney Lumet's 1957 film is a stirring celebration of independent thought; a visceral, sweaty, cranky exploration of masculine antagonism and unchallenged prejudice; and a tribute to the moral and metaphorical power of a freshly pressed white suit.