Screen: Ars Gratia Artis
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
some real depth and genuine religious feeling. Even his arbit- rariness in plotting, which in other places makes his book absurd, serves here to show his hero's helplessness against his own...
...Cardinal Ralph de Bricassart in The Thorn Birds is similarly spared by God, and punished through his son...
...Like Humbert, Hermann is an aloof and rather jaundiced observer of life, a man who takes an ironic and bemused attitude toward the foibles of the human race-- a race of which he is not quite a part...
...And Brady, callous twenty times over to blood and violent death, is so innocent sexually that his middle-aged mistress's erotic skill puzzles and overwhelms him...
...Another way in which the film dangles images between us and the reality of the characters' lives is through reflections...
...Another Irish Catholic novel, The Thorn Birds burst the coffers of the publishing industry last year, producing the largest paperback sale in history ($1.9 million...
...It strips its creative gears...
...On a business trip, Hermann sees a gypsy of some sort, Felix (Kraus Ldwitsch), whom he decides is his exact double, and he induces Felix to stand in for him in a complex scheme he dreams up to collect insurance money on his own death...
...And even then, greeting her warmly as he does, he seems not to recognize, or at least not bother about, her obvious infidelity...
...Even his arbitrariness in plotting, which in other places makes his book absurd, serves here to show his hero's helplessness against his own past and the life it has left him with...
...This sort of uncertainty about point of view leads to inevitable confusions between image and reality, and the film spends a great deal of its considerable artistic energy creating mischief here, too...
...Hermann Hermann himself bears a good deal more than just a vague resemblance to a later, more famous character in Nabokov's fiction, Humbert 'Humbert...
...Hermann's is exclusively with him~f One tleednot :actually go beyond Despair to other Nabokov fict~inorder to finda doppelgdnger for Hermann...
...The Irishmen in McCullogh's book are not very Irish, be- yond having red hair...
...The same is true of Brady's machina- tions on behalf of his priggish son and his nullity of a nephew...
...Hermann and very polished, self-conscious artists like Nabokov, Stoppard, Fassbinder, or Bogarde would naturally be drawn to each other...
...If a narcissist like Hermann is self-involved, he is at the same time, paradoxically, self-detached as well...
...Even Humbert Humbert's feeling for Lolita is not real human passion, but only obses- sion...
...Boccaccio would have been pleased...
...It doesn't humanize the characters or even the direction of the film in any way...
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...A personality like Hermann's provides a ready ground on which the others can meet~ How elaborate the games to be played with point of view are in Despair becomes apparent the very next time Hermann watches himself make love, when it turns out to be the voyeur sitting down the hall who is the real Hermann...
...The effect is to make us see Hermann as someone sealed off from other people, as if he were a precious aesthetic object from the old Russia that is kept in a bell jar...
...It ends brutally and sadly, yet ultimately it has too drab and commonplace a mood to be called tragic...
...This has required a change of pace for the young whirlwind who is so facile he was able to turn out over thirty films in less than a decade...
...The modern, post-Godfather audience seems to feel corrup- tion deserves a break...
...On the contrary, the character of Hermann seems at times merely a convenience, an expedient, that al- lows for this sort of display of virtuosity...
...In order to feel such a profound disgust for life, one must first have a great passion for it, and passion is definitely not in Hermann's nature...
...Despair seems an almost over- bearing attempt to achieve the opposite--to demonstrate that with greater resources and more time, he can turn on in a single film the kind of creative power that made possible thirty films in ten years...
...The quickness of the visual wit here is enough to boggle our minds, if it isn't so quick that it goes by unnoticed altogether...
...It is also relevant that McCullogh is superior to Carroll when it comes to handling children and to supplying secondary charac- ters with a defined personality, though she borrows the brushes of other pulp writers for these sketches...
...This is a questionable purpose for any art, and perhaps an impossible, irrelevant one for the mass art of movies...
...Carroll, that connoisseur of shadows, has hitched a ride on Puzo's bandwagon...
...But then after he's come to bed with her, he still sees himself sitting down the hall watching himself make love to her...
...Despair is a film made to be that highly wrought bird in Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium"--the "golden bird upon a golden bough" crafted solely to "keep a drowsy emperor awake...
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...Characters constantly see and speak to each other through glass partitions in Hermann and Lydia's art deco apartment, in various offices, in a carnival fun house, etc...
...In a sense the film itself becomes a similar aesthetic object, something held out of the audience's reach in a glass case of artistry...
...A whole dimension of dreary, domestic Catholicism can be glimpsed in that disapproval...
...Thus we have established in the opening scene Hermann's indifference to Lydia, perhaps to life in general, and his involvement with himself...
...Despair is a peculiar, hollow echo of one of Fassbin- der's earliest films, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok...
...Having Hermann for their central character, Nabokov, Stoppard and, especially, Fassbinder take advantage of the opportunity he provides to play elaborate aesthetic games...
...Like Humbert, Her- mann, who is a Russian dmigrd living well in Berlin in the late 1920s, is an outsider, an alien...
...What is the purpose, after all, of the sort of imaginative fretwork represented by that painting on the rathskeller wall...
...and Hermann is like Humbert in this, too...
...The zest is gone which might have made his sloppy plotting and Brady'smereurial character changes acceptable...
...It was savaged in these pages by Stephen Kroll a year and a half ago...
...Many of Carroll's minor people (e.g., the nephew) and even some of his principals--are no more than department store mannequins with a name.tag sewn on...
...As this opening gambit of the story also suggests, point of view is everything in Despair, It would be, of course, in a biography of a narcissist...
...Images continually anticipate realities in bizarre ways...
...True, The Thorn Birds is little more than a trashy romance of the women's magazine variety, but it does offer a consistent style and tone and an emotional commitment to its material that is straightforward and, if anything, naive in its sincerity...
...The film opens with a scene in which Hermann plays a little seduction game with Lydia, watching her undress...
...In similar fashion, a painting of a mountain scene on which the camera lingers in a rathskeller early in the film proves to be the actual scene in which the film ends...
...His son is murdered, but his grandson lives...
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...He stands always outside himself, watching his life go by, which puts him in roughly the same position that the novelist, scriptwriter and film director occupy in creating his story...
...The dissimilarity between the two paintings which Hermann thought were the same should have given him pause, we see later, about his ability to pick a convincing double for himself...
...Fasshinder has shown himself here, in his fast big-budget production, to be fit stylistic company for Nabokov...
...At least Humbert's Comrnonweah 689 obsession is with someone else...
...Kroll's critique was intelligent, but he might have been more generous with the novel if he examined it alongside the far more pretentiousMortal Friends...
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...It's more mysterious even than that since the point of view in the rathskeller painting is the one assumed in reality later by Hermann, who sees in the middle of the scene, however, Ardalion making a new painting from a different point of view...
...Carroll has researched the historical background of his novel and has a good sense of theology, but these attributes do not make up for the sheer artificiality of many of his scenes and the flimsy, poorly carpentered narrative structure...
...Consider, for instance, how unmoved Hermann is when he catches his wife Lydia (Andrea Ferreol) inflagrante delecto in the studio of her cousin, a painter named Ardalion (Volker Spengler...
...But that film, like his other earlier work, is distinctive for the spareness and flatness of its narrative...
...Indeed, Her- mann outdoes Humbert on this score...
...Brady does not die...
...Screen ARS GRATIA ARTIS FASSBINDER'S 'DESPAIR' W HEN a raw feeling like Despair is surrounded by four artists in such perfect control of their talents as Vladimir Nabokov, Tom Stoppard, Rainer Fassbin- der and Dirk Bogarde, the original emotion is hardly recogniz- able in the result...
...it saps the vitality from the author's attempt to give us an honest, sympathetic account of political and spiritual corruption...
...There is, however, a good deal of ecclesiastical subject matter, including some interesting scenes at the vatican which, in their combination of intrigue and piety, are reminiscent of the novels of Morris West...
...The love affair goes no place in particular...
...Soon, no doubt we shall all recover our patriotism by realiz- ing that a government that can thwart all its i~eals, giving way to cynicism, hypocrisy and criminality, and still be one of the word'S great powers, must be on the fight track somehow...
...In the main, it is quite innocent of the manipulations of plot and character that Carroll must be indicted for...
...The result seems almost over-powered...
...Despair seems to be the cadenza toward which Fassbinder's career has been build- ing up to now...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK,JR...
...Not until he's found the painting, and seen that it only vaguely resembles the one he saw elsewhere, does he take cognizance of Lydia's presence...
...As a popular novel, Mortal Friends is inferior to The Godfather and even to The Thorn Birds, being less original than the former and less emotionally compelling than the latter...
...Because of this circumstance perhaps, but also by temperament, he is something of an outsider to all life...
...And without zest, the implausibility gains prominence...
...Each self watches the other, neither paying much attention to Lydia, as Hermann proceeds with his conjugal bliss...
...but then, the cadenza, dazzling as it is, is never the best part of the concerto...
...Hermann doesn't even notice what's going on because he's come to the studio to see whether Ardalion has in his possession still a certain painting Hermann thinks he just saw somewhere else...
...To some extent, the lack of connection with the sources of vulgar excitement makes Mortal Friends seem meaningful...
...Hermann finds one for himself right in the original novel...
...The point of view is, to our surprise, the reverse of what it was in the earlier scene...
...But Carroll has lost a lot in gaining that impression of significance...
...Brady has been staying for years with a widowed sister who preceded him to America, and when that sister sees his prosperous, Protestant, adulterous sweetheart--the first serious love interest in Brady's life for a decade and more--she disapproves...
...If he ruins his life in the end, it is not so much out of despair as out ofennui, or, more likely still, out of a narcissism bred from ennui...
...Thus images reflected or etched on the glass are superimposed on the characters themselves, and Hermann, when he is talking to Lydia or someone else this way, often appears to be talking only to himself because his own reflection blocks our view of the other person...
...In fact, we have to take the title, which Stoppard and Fassbinder's f'tlm retains from Nabokov's novel, as something of a joke...
...Like everything else in his life, this scheme and Hermann's relationship with Felix are just a form of self-regarding...
...For the last thing that the hero, Hermann Hermann (Bogarde), would be likely to feel is any- thing so possessing as despair...
Vol. 105 • October 1978 • No. 21
