The Kästner film adaptation “Fabian or The Walk to the Dogs” is Dominik Graf’s finest work to date.
Can you envy a young writer for being in the right place at the right time? Erich Kästner’s “Fabian” roams around 1931 – when the original edition of the novel appeared – the Babylonian Berlin. The excessive hedonism arouses in him as much skepticism as the artistic extremes of his time: The problem with the avant-garde, he says smugly in Dominik Graf’s film, is that it always has to be so avant-garde.
In this word you can find not only Kästner, who is often misunderstood in its literary meaning, but perhaps also a dilemma in German film. We look longingly back to its heyday in Weimar – when, in a functioning film industry, works of art that were simultaneously recognized worldwide were created. In 1931 alone came out: Fritz Lang’s “M”, Leontine Sagan’s “Girls in Uniform”, Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s “Threepenny Opera” and “Kameradschaft”. There was the metropolitan realism of “Berlin Alexanderplatz” and a kind of youth edition of it, “Emil and the Detectives”. And there was a dream-like musical like “The Congress Dances”.
Dominik Graf never came to terms with this unity of art and entertainment, which later became exotic in Germany, which was particularly evident in many of his television thrillers. But he is also, if you will, a German Martin Scorsese in his advocacy for national film heritage. Anyone who wants to get an idea of Berlin in the 1930s will find the best of all time machines in film history.
In the opening setting, Graf leads elegantly from the present to the past via one of the beautiful historic Berlin subway stations. Even in the following three hours, Tom Schilling’s main character may still not have a whole foot, but still with a shoe heel in today: be it in the difficult to explain reluctance to wear hats on the street, which was obligatory at the time, or in a modern style of language. Graf also makes him our contemporary in his staging. Just like the cinematic form partly uses earlier stylistic devices (silent film subtitles) or later technologies (Super8 or handheld video camera).
Both economical and effective, incised documentary silent film images replace lavish crowd scenes and provide a few extra bars of “big city symphony”. It seems a bit as if Graf wanted to use these stylistic devices to make Kästner’s Neue Sachlichkeit appear more avant-garde than it was at the time.
As is the case with the sets, as is so often the case when today’s films evoke this time, exuding a little more Art Deco and Bauhaus chic than was common back then. But it all looks much better than “Babylon Berlin” and doesn’t cast a shadow over the actual heart of the film, the airy, sensual staging of the love story with Saskia Rosendahl as Fabian’s friend Cornelia Battenberg. Not only does she play a newborn star, she is after this movie too.
As a spectator of her audition at Ufa, Fabian takes refuge sadly, but determined to forget her, into the backdrops of the film city. It’s an iconic scene about the glories and shadows of filmmaking and for this critic the image that stayed in the memory of the last Berlinale – even if the film, one of the best of the festival, was denied a prize.
The real magic of this film is not its musical rhythm or the montage of historical and modern elements. It is Graf’s light-handed staging art. It is the joy of playing that reminds us once again that there is a continuity in German film history – its first-class actors and actresses. It is not for nothing that a visit to a film set is a central scene here. Graf celebrates his own profession here with as much gusto as so many French Nouvelle Vague films did in the 1960s that deal with filmmaking.
It goes without saying that this journey through time into the late period of the Weimar Republic is also frightening. This is where Fabian’s innocence, his playful curiosity, reaches its most ominous limits. “Everything has to be put into a new order, it can’t go on like this,” one explains to him in an old-fashioned way. His best friend has already committed suicide as a senseless victim of a joke, born of the arrogance of power.
Kästner’s autobiographical walk “to the dogs”, from the youth’s thirst for freedom into the looming gloom, could hardly be more topical. It would be easy to overemphasize the parallels to the current resurgence of fascist ideologies; Graf prefers to weave it in subliminally like the counterpoint to an actually easy melody. So far there has been a lack of masterpieces in Graf’s immense and consistently top-class work. Without a doubt, one thing has been achieved here, and the best thing about it is that the sophisticated will to form does not weigh down the lightness.
Fabian or going to the dogs. D 2021. Director: Dominik Graf. 176 min.
