Fabian or Der Gang vor die Hunde (2021)

Directed by: Dominik Graf | 176 minutes | drama, romance | Actors: Tom Schilling, Albrecht Schuch, Saskia Rosendahl, Michael Wittenborn, Petra Kalkutschke, Elmar Gutmann, Aljoscha Stadelmann, Anne Bennent, Meret Becker, Eva Medusa Gühne, Julia Preuß, Lukas Rüppel, Michael Hanemann, Oliver Reinhard, Jörg-Uwe Schröder

Berlin, early thirties, the waning days of the Weimar Republic. Born pessimist Dr. Jakob Fabian works out of necessity (read: for room rent and wallebakken) in the advertising department of a cigarette factory. The thoughtful 32-year-old grew up in a small middle-class family in a village near Dresden and has a PhD in Germanic literature, even if he is unreasonably broke every now and then. Although it doesn’t particularly hurt Jacob, because it happens to so many in the country, he loses his job and the right to a decent life. Especially a pity, because just at that moment he meets the woman of his life. However, provided the inflation on life doesn’t rise too fast, Jakob still has his good friend Stephan Labude as a pass to a trip to the end of the night. Welcome to the wonderful world of ‘Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde’, a playful and whimsical German capital film with striking observations about the ups and downs of yesteryear.

‘Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde’ is a free adaptation of a novel by Erich Kästner. Quite unexpectedly, Kästner, who mainly wrote for children, came up with a depressing and critical big city novel that the Nazis later burned at the stake with the predicate: degenerate art. Director Dominik Graf, a loyal servant in the German film and television world (many Tatorts to his credit), clearly takes pleasure in translating Kästner’s book to the silver screen. The capital is devoid of god, and a great foaming mass, unable to drink from the golden chalice of life, stirs. Meanwhile it is already crawling with brown shirts in Munich.

Actors Tom Schilling (Jakob Fabian), Albrecht Schuch (Stephan Labude) and Saskia Rosendahl (Cornelia Battenberg) play as if their lives depend on it. Seriously, but occasionally with a wink. With that, the game is refreshingly sardonic without being too haughty. However, like Jacob, the story is also quite contemplative and would rather wallow in the romanticism of fatalism than stand behind any cause. The world has to endure enough idealistic followers already, you hear Jakob muse, so it is better to keep the mob, including their rage and despair, at an appropriate distance. This is all the more remarkable in light of how the film opens: a slow-moving shot of the underground subway station at Heidelbergplatz in 2019. The unapproachable digital camera moves at a walking pace towards an exit, the sun reflecting brightly in the lens. Once outside it is 1931, in Berlin.

After another long night of slump, the intoxicated Jakob loses his baton at an above-ground metro stop. At dawn, a war veteran, visibly mauled by his service at the front, shakes him awake. The murmur and Quasimodo face of the front soldier bore through the tomcat and give Jacob nightmares. What on earth is going on? In the city, in the country? The cabinet of curiosities in the first half of ‘Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde’ overwhelms. For this, director Graf leaves few tricks and tricks in the field of editing, cinematography and sound for nothing, including changing voice-overs within one scene. In this collage of a film, Jakob Fabian not only tells but is also told.

For a smooth avant-garde revue, Berliners are plucked from the streets who are even less traceable than the political chaos in which the Weimar Republic now finds itself: left is exchangeable for right and moral for amoral. After all, there Jakob meets his great love for the first time, the aspiring actress Cornelia Battenberg. The sometimes sketchy film breathes German classics such as the fifteen-hour television drama ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz’ (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980), also based on a contemporary novel from the Weimar period, and the gruesome misfit ‘The Serpent’s Egg’ (1977) by Swedish master filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. Bergman and Fassbinder’s disenchantment and cynicism about the human condition is much greater than that of Graf, and is a natural prelude to the crimes of the Nazi regime. In the second half, the three-hour long ‘Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde’ becomes a bit weak and it often hesitates. However, the romantic heart does not come without the necessary sacrifices and this unruly odyssey offers the viewer an idea or three about which way a neglected democratic society can march.