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| Director Dominik Graf |
FABIAN: GOING TO THE DOGS (Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde) A Germany (176 mi) 2021
Tender and beautiful
fronds
of my beloved plane tree,
let Fate smile upon you.
May thunder, lightning, and storms
never disturb your dear peace,
nor may you by blowing winds be profaned.
Never was a shade
of any plant
dearer and more lovely,
or more sweet.
—Georg Friedrich Händel, Xerxes Largo, 1738, G F Handel – “Ombra Mai Fu”, Fritz Wunderlich, 1962 YouTube (3:06)
Dominik Graf was born in Munich and graduated from the Munich Film and TV Academy, and while he is associated with the best directors of modern German cinema, he is among the least known overseas, with only two of his more than fifty film projects ever released in the USA, his 2014 Friedrich Schiller biopic BELOVED SISTERS (2014) and this extraordinary film, as his success has largely come in the German television industry, where he is perhaps best known as a director of police procedurals. An earlier project from members of the Berlin School, however, was shown on the festival circuit, as the talents of three of Germany’s most significant filmmakers, Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhäusler, were brought together in a TV mini-series, The Dreileben Trilogy, a trio of interlocking films, all taking place in the same location and linked by one event, the escape of a convicted murderer, with Graf directing the second episode, Don't Follow Me Around (Dreileben 2 – Komm mir nicht nach) (2011). Now 71-years of age, this feels more like a magnum opus, a massive, formally creative three-hour adaptation of Erich Kästner’s semi-autobiographical, avant garde novel from 1931, Fabian: the Story of a Moralist, which was censored by his publisher, actually omitting a chapter, where it wasn’t until 2013 that it was finally published intact. Described by Goebbels as decadent Asphalt literature, labeled degenerate art by the Nazis where it was banned and burned on Berlin’s Opernplatz in 1933, it remains an outstanding account of the times he lived in, underestimated in its importance when it was written, as it precisely anticipates what was to come, with Graf capturing the language of the novelist, but more importantly the images he conveyed, a kaleidoscope of that time, set primarily in Berlin during the Depression before the coming to power of the Nazis, where the ill-fated Weimar Republic is a backdrop. Its epic scope and psychological detail recalls Fassbinder’s BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1980), a 14-part, fifteen-hour television mini-series based on Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel by the same name, with both films exploring the origins of Germany’s rising tide of fascism by placing the focus on a central character who is caught up in the changing times. Fassbinder’s Franz Bieberkopf is an ordinary man who is certainly capable of becoming a Nazi, while Graf’s Jakob Fabian is an unemployed academic who aspires to become an author, a moralist in an increasingly amoral world, who ends up fighting for his very soul, but is steamrolled into submission by darker forces that surround and eventually suffocate him. Somewhat reminiscent of Pietro Marcello’s intensely creative and vividly experimental literary adaptation of Jack London’s 2020 Top Ten List #1 Martin Eden made a year earlier, which similarly addresses the struggle for artistic recognition during a period of historical change in post-war Italy, where a writer determined to be completely free is eventually a prisoner of his own beliefs, unable to bring about social change or even live in an unjust world. A heavily stylized aesthetic captures the manic energy and ill-fated romance at the center of this film, featuring exuberant staging, as images mixed with documentary material are wildly edited together, often resembling the exhilarating fast-action sequences of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s AMÉLIE (2001), moving at a clipped pace to provide a sweeping view of Germany in transition. Mixing Super 8 footage with digital, the remarkable cinematography by Hanno Lentz, a staple of Doris Dörrie films like Greetings from Fukushima (Grüsse aus Fukushima) (2016), offers plenty of twists and turns with constant tempo changes, displaying an aesthetic grittiness with a shaky handheld camera, crude zooms, slow motion, blurring, picture-in-picture collages, massive overexposure, jump cuts, axis jumps, lens flares, maps displayed, stills, and occasional black and white, with short archival inserts, while also utilizing split-screen techniques with parallel scenes evoking the visual experiments of expressionist cinema. In an amazing opening scene, Graf takes us through a time portal of the underground Berlin Heidelberger Platz station, viewed initially in the present as passengers depart the train, but by the time the mobile camera makes its way up the stairs, with a glaring Nazi swastika seen on the wall, we find ourselves on the streets of Berlin in 1931, where the city has transformed itself in the blink of an eye. As is often the case in contemporary German films, the picturesque, unrenovated Görlitz, Saxony, Germany can serve as old Berlin.
Kästner’s novel was adapted once before, by Wolf Gremm with
FABIAN (1980), chosen by West Germany as their submission for Best Foreign
Language film, but it didn’t make the final cut. Immersed in literary complexities, written by
Graf and Constantin Lieb, at the heart of the story is Jakob Fabian (Tom
Schiller), a jaded yet altruistic chain-smoking loner with a doctorate in
German studies living in a cheap rooming house, employed as a copywriter at an
advertising agency promoting the sale of cigarettes, while wandering the
streets of Weimar Berlin at night with his only friend Stephan Labude (Albrecht
Schuch), having met during the war, the openly leftist, crisis-prone heir of neglectful
parents, often seen wallowing in the depths of despair, who has spent the last
five years writing a PhD dissertation on Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing, one of the great humanists in the Age of Enlightenment, a German
playwright, philosopher, and the first dramaturg. Most vivid here is a sense of purposelessness
and intense restlessness, as Fabian holds a nihilistic view on love and life,
having been traumatized by his experience as a soldier in World War I, which
continues to haunt him even in his dreams.
After the defeat in 1918, Germany plunged into a malaise of economic and
social turmoil, as people were left adrift, while dire economic circumstances
contributed to a breakdown of structures, engendering vast social and cultural
disintegration, and while this is one of Germany’s darkest periods, at the time
no one realized how dark it would become.
Graf has created a highly atmospheric portrayal of a troubled city
losing itself in the hedonistic quest for pleasure and sex, temporary fixes for
the surrounding chaos that envelops them, where again and again Graf interjects
quotes from the novel through both male and female narrative voiceovers. As they visit nightclubs, brothels, and artsy
avant garde establishments, they relish discussions on the condition of
humanity, with Labude, who comes from a wealthy family, believing economic
improvement will help the poverty that he sees all around them, while Fabian, a
pacifist, argues that improvement will come only when individuals learn to
think for themselves, take responsibility, and reconstruct themselves morally,
where he wonders, “Does the world have a capacity for decency?” Berlin and its streets and haunts are
surrealistically portrayed, where voyeurism is part of the prototypical Weimar
experience, painting a picture of unlimited decadence. Overall, the feeling is one of sadness and
loneliness as Fabian walks the streets, seeing the decay around him and the
constant fights between communists and the police, realizing he lacks the
ability to change the situation beyond expressing a hope for rationality, while
Labude is arrested for his support of communism and holding rallies for
dockworkers, but is quickly bailed out by his father. Graf probes the hopelessness, intrigue, and
degeneration of Weimar Berlin, where a feverish energy exists as if tomorrow
may never come, making a lot of sharply incisive observations, where the
frantic editing stitches together a frenzied underground nightclub scene that
borders on the nightmarish and the bizarre, where a prevailing sense of order
is hinted at by the growing numbers of brownshirts in the street, often seen
protruding on the edge of the frame, or hauling off a patron in a restaurant, with
Nazi symbols and posters attached to the city walls, like a premonition of
what’s to come. Here the present creeps
in again and again, because the past is not fixed, but in constant motion, as
many characters come and go. Fabian
describes himself as a passive observer, a dreamer seeking meaning who abhors
the Nazis, and while he’d like to be as liberated as his friend, who throws
himself into every fight, this thought also fills him with despair, especially
after Labude’s outlook deteriorates when he learns that his bride-to-be has
been unfaithful, sending him into an emotional tailspin, drinking himself into
oblivion, eventually passing out on the bed, while in the late night hour of
his room Fabian finds time to jot down poetic thoughts in his notebook,
becoming a chronicler of the times.
The same train carries us all And time passes as we go
We peer out, we see, we saw The same train carries us all How far we’ll travel we do not know One neighbor sleeps, another laments A third talks unceasingly
“Stations came and went. Yet the train racing across the years At it’s goal will never be.”
Rather than a conventional narrative, this is more of a series of set pieces, episodes tied together by its protagonist Jacob Fabian (likely Kästner himself) and the city of Berlin, using historical recordings, newspaper clippings, photographs, and passages from Kästner's novel, where it could be viewed as a tale of the conflict between communism and fascism, though it’s perhaps best appreciated not for plot, or even character, but for the vital sense of time, place, and milieu it conveys, along with its timeless depictions of flawed human nature, navigating trauma and uncertainty in Berlin during the four-year period between the 1929 market crash and the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933. Fabian meets a liberated and self-confident woman with designs on becoming an actress, the beautifully engaging Cornelia, Saskia Rosendahl from Kate Shortland’s Lore (2012) and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away (Werk ohne Autor) (2018), which also stars Tom Schilling. Curiously, they, along with Albrecht Schuch, all come from East Germany, part of a younger generation that ideally embodies what has been described as an Eastern consciousness, the first generation that has grown up in a united Germany. Setting his pessimistic attitude aside for a brief moment, Fabian falls in love, fueled by sexual euphoria, which is surprisingly tender and intimate, reigniting a sense of hope in his crumbling existence, where life seems to imprint itself on them, on their faces and bodies, on their movements, on their gazes, yet what remains is the longing, filled with sadness and euphoria. But then he too falls victim to the great wave of layoffs, joining the massive ranks of the unemployed, Fabian - Going to the Dogs new clip official from Berlin Film ... YouTube (1:34), and while he thinks this is temporary, it lingers well into the discomfort zone, plunging him back into depression, where his angst and shifting emotions mirror the shell-shock of his generation. While their prospects appear doomed right from the outset, with Cornelia whispering in his ear that he is “infected by the misery of the world,” Graf captures a growing sense of desperation and existential despair, triggered by the sounds of gunshots, Fabian - Going to the Dogs new clip official from Berlin Film ... YouTube (2:38), which is even more exacerbated when Cornelia’s career as an actress takes off, largely due to the protection and sexual interest of her older boss, the wealthy film producer, Makart (Aljoscha Stadelmann), who corrupts her with money, an arrangement Fabian finds difficult to accept, as they face increasing despair in a world where Nazi ideology is becoming more mainstream. There is a parallel to Makart in Irene Moll (Meret Becker), a prostitute with a perplexing arrangement with her husband, who wants to get to know Fabian better and insists he sign a contract where he will even pay for him to sleep with his wife, but Fabian refuses. Later they run into each other again as she runs a men’s brothel for rich women, and when they meet for the last time it’s on a train, where she again offers him money to accompany her to Budapest or Prague or Vienna, but in each instance, unlike Cornelia, he refuses her offer. The film is provocative and troubling as we meet hypocritical newspaper editors, prostitutes (male and female), naive activists, opportunists, politically enraged drunks shooting pistols, a detached father and absent mother, a depraved husband, a malignantly jealous academic, all in an atmosphere of abundant alcohol and hyper-charged sexuality, where the prevailing mood of catastrophe is represented by the catchphrase, “Life is a chance, death is a certainty.” Despite the commonplace street violence taking place between the National Socialists and communists, creating a disruptive force of chaos everywhere you look, showing society on the brink of collapse, this epic romantic failure and doomed uncertainty is set against a background of fantastic innovation in the arts, as there is an unapologetic admiration, where it’s important to understand that the cinema of the Weimar Republic is still the foundation of German film history, like G.W. Pabst’s Pandora's Box (Die Büchse der Pandora) (1928) or von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel) (1930). A character notes near the end, “The wrong people live, and the wrong people die,” where that everpresent fatalism is reminiscent of a very dark Sydney Pollack film from the late 60’s, THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY? (1969), which depicts a marathon Depression-era dance competition in which all the participants are never going to actually receive the promised prize. It’s also interesting to point out the similarities between the novelist Kästner and Fabian himself, as both were born in Dresden, worked as an advertisement writer in Berlin, were pacifists, and shared a weakness for young actresses. The essential takeaway from the film is the vitality in which it is told, as well as the tragedy and immediate urgency of a moment in history, literally immersing viewers in the same streets the author walked, with Graf making the past so tangible, so present, where parallels to the present are unmistakable, with a steadily advancing shift to the right, with the reemergence of fascism and ultra-right wing nationalism spreading across Europe, becoming a frightening parable of current contemporary history.
