Fabian: Going to the Dogs Review: Dominik Graf’s Shared Nightmare of the Past

The film’s characters are suffused with a paradoxical kind of fear that can only happen in a dream.

Fabian: Going to the Dogs
Photo: Hanno Lentz/Lupo Film

Dominik Graf’s Fabian: Going to the Dogs opens with a slow dolly shot down a stairway into an ornate subway station in Berlin. While anybody familiar with the film’s source material, Erich Kästner’s 1931 novel Fabian: The Story of a Moralist, will expect the story to be set in Germany’s interwar era, we’re clearly in the present day, as the people on screen are seen wearing, among other things, polos and jeans. But as the camera moves through the station and up an opposite stairway, the expected period clothing begins to appear on the commuters. Cresting the stairs, the camera finally situates us in the twilight days of the Weimar Republic—or, at least, in Graf’s consciously incomplete simulation of it.

Other signs indicate that we’re in the present, from the streets of black concrete to an especially pointed glimpse of stolpersteine, the brass stumbling stones inlaid into sidewalks to memorialize Holocaust victims. This kind of telescoped approach to historical fiction, one that emphasizes our position relative to the events we observe, recalls Michael Almereyda’s Tesla. Graf’s approach, however, resists overly jarring distancing devices, like a narrator with Google entries at her finger tips. Moreover, the frenetic, grimly playful aesthetic that the filmmaker deploys suits his subject, the chaotic society of the short-lived Weimar Republic, whose tumult and widespread anxiety gave birth, at least in Berlin, to some of the wildest experiments in art and life, before these were snuffed out by the German state’s slide into fascism.

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After the slow, methodical tracking shot that opens it, Fabian erupts into a flurry of images, rapidly alternating between grainy low-gauge film stock and washed-out digital video. We’re introduced to Jakob Fabian (Tom Schilling), a shell-shocked war veteran with a literature degree who’s settled for work as an advertising copywriter, in the midst of a raucous night out. Fabian goes home with an older woman (Meret Becker) only to discover that he needs to sign a contract with her husband in order to sleep with her, and may even be entitled to compensation for doing so. Disturbed by the cynical mixture of decadence and businesslike procedure that underlies his diverting Berlin nightlife, he flees back into the night.

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Here and elsewhere, Fabian is unable to cope with the ethos of the times, the desperation-fueled abandonment of human relations that determines the life path of nearly everybody he comes across. An incompetent co-worker steals his idea for an ad campaign and he ends up jobless, and soon after meeting and falling in love with Cornelia (Saskia Rosendahl), an aspiring actress who coincidentally lives in his building, Fabian is forced to accept that she’s become the mistress of a film producer in order to get a foothold in the movies.

In its general outline, this story of a young man unable to emotionally deal with his lover’s sexuality is overfamiliar. But Graf manages to enliven this hoary trope by keeping us at some distance from Fabian with an artificial, authorly voiceover narration that alternates between male and female voices. Despite, or perhaps because of, our remove from the couple, their courtship becomes the only genuine thing in a world that’s, well, going to the dogs. Marked by the kinds of goofy fun young people who immediately open themselves to one another partake in—conspiratorial sneaking around to avoid their landlady, hijinks at a lake outside Berlin, spontaneous late-night folk dances performed in the buff—Fabian and Cornelia’s earnest romance breaks through the tragicomic irony of the voiceover narration.

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The aristocratic Labude (Albrecht Schuch), a colleague from Fabian’s PhD program, represents an exception to the insidious cynicism of society at large. Profoundly anxious over his postdoctoral thesis, Labude is also an active social-democratic rabble-rouser and an agitator for the principles of reason and justice. With his ideals, the man, like the commuters waiting on the train platform at the start of the film, seems to have come temporally unstuck, his thoughts not suited to the times—which is perhaps why the more disaffected Fabian always seems to have the final word in their conversations. At one point, when Fabian defends himself for merely observing rather than acting, Labude asks, “Whom does that help?” Fabian’s defeatist reply, “Who is to be helped?” casts a shadow over the whole film.

Eventually, both Labude’s socialist-lite political agitation and Fabian’s writerly attitude of distanced observation are swallowed up by the tides of history. While Kästner’s book, published less than two years before the Nazis took power, conveys the foreboding sense that the Weimar Republic was at its end without possessing the knowledge of what precisely was to come, we and the film have inherited those dreadful details as part of world history. Kästner’s darkly satirical book turns a rather sober glance toward a society in which its author was embedded, while the film, with its bricolage of images and the dream logic of its temporally dislocated places and grotesque caricatures, conjures a shared nightmare of the past. Its characters are suffused with a paradoxical kind of fear that can only happen in a dream—the dread before an immense catastrophe that’s unavoidable because it’s already happened.

Score: 
 Cast: Tom Schilling, Saskia Rosendahl, Albrecht Schuch, Meret Becker, Michael Wittenborn, Petra Kalkutschke, Elmar Gutmann, Aljoscha Stadelmann, Anne Bennent, Eva Medusa Gühne  Director: Dominik Graf  Screenwriter: Dominik Graf, Constantin Lieb  Running Time: 178 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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