Word: despairingly
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...shell of a man, balding, emaciated and hopelessly addicted. Hurt has been given the task of portraying the most sensitive character in the film, a broken man who retains an appreciation for the spontaneous quip and the caresses of a pet cat. He most eloquently conveys Max's impotent despair when he discovers the danging carcass of his feline hanging from the cord of a light bulb in the prison, an odious testimony to the malice of the prison guard Rifki (Paolo Bonacelli...
...Maybe Despair never takes off because Stoppard and Fassbinder differ from Nabokov in a key area: both are extraordinarily fast workers. ("Rainer Werner Fassbinder is thirty-one" the Welles Theater's notes tell us, "and his film credits already outnumber his years"). Once they have this great idea, they don't take the time to figure out how to use it. Herman tells us that he's a movie actor, but a movie actor isn't autonomous. He should be a director, attempting not only to control how we see him, but how we see everything. Often we see Herman...
Nabokov's novel indicates that Herman can't possibly turn life into art, because life is messy and disordered, and it's got to intrude on his perfect vision--a fitting reason for "despair." Nabokov conveys the idea that Herman's plump wife is having an affair with her puerile cousin without the narrator even being aware of it. And when Herman violently proclaims to have found his "perfect double," a tramp named Felix whom he encounters on a path (in a glass funhouse in a movie), we have our nagging doubts that what Herman tells us he sees really...
Fassbinder has composed Despair beautifully. His technique includes various witty framing devices, quirky angles and long-shots, and inspired fooling around with light sources (especially neat when Herman talks with Felix in a dark hotel room, and swings the hanging lamp so that each of them is lit in turn while the other goes dark). The director cleverly conveys the crack-up of Herman's perfect work of art by placing him beside a shattered mirror, which fragments his image...
...INTERVIEW reprinted by the Welles Theater, Fassbinder discusses Herman's mid-life crisis and "painful search for something that moves." It sounds great on paper, but I don't see it in the movie. I see an elegant, poorly thought-out but often very fascinating film of Despair. Nabokov pulled off a miracle in his novel: we stood outside Herman Hermann and still felt his pain; we experienced his warped vision and still perceived pieces of reality. But neither Nabokov's lucidity nor his despair have made it to the screen...