RW Fassbinder's masterpiece adapted from Vladimir Nabokov for the 1st time on Blu-ray disc™ and DVD!

Hermann Hermann is a Russian-born chocolate factory owner in early 1930s Germany. Sharing his fantasies and perversions with his wife Lydia, he leads a sheltered, upper-middle-class but one-dimensional life. As the country prepares for political upheaval, Hermann is haunted by visions of his double. During a business trip, he meets the wanderer Felix and sees in him his look-alike who inspires him with a risky plan: Felix and Hermann are going to switch roles in life. Although this wanderer is physically very different from Hermann, the figure of Felix gradually becomes an obsession...

With Despair, Rainer Werner Fassbinder realizes his first international production in English, bringing together Dirk Bogarde (Mort à Venise) and Andréa Ferréol (La Grande Bouffe). Adapted from a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, this iconoclastic work depicts Germany in the 1930s against a backdrop of the rise of Nazism. Faithful to his cinema, Fassbinder composes a baroque film influenced as much by classical dramas as by psychedelic aesthetics. Crossed by the figure of the double and inhabited by a disturbing strangeness, Despair, today restored in high definition, is also one of the most formally brilliant films of its author!

“There is, in the life of any person, a moment when we understand that basically everything is finished, that even if life continues, it is nothing more than a repetition and a conscious appropriation of feelings. Despair is about someone who does not stop there, who tells himself that a life made up only of repetitions is no longer a life. But instead of committing suicide as in The Devil Probably by Bresson, he very voluntarily decides to go mad. » RW Fassbinder

DESPAIR
(1978 – Colors – 115 mins)

SUPPLEMENTS *

. THE CINEMA AND ITS DOUBLE: REVIEW OF "DESPAIR" BY RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER a film by Robert Fischer (2011 – Colors – 70 mn)
From the writing of the screenplay to the screening in competition at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival, Despair is told to us by Tom Stoppard, Andréa Ferréol, Michael Ballhaus, Juliane Lorenz and many others.

. TRAILER 2012

* in HD on the Blu-ray version

Released September 19, 2012