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Saskia Rosendahl and Tom Schilling in "Fabian": For a short time in luck
Photo: DCM
It is a strange sentence that Dominik Graf prefixed his film adaptation of Erich Kästner's "Fabian" through interviews. The length of the film - it is around three hours - corresponds to the time it takes to read the novel, according to the director and co-author. As a warning to young people who are threatened with reading the classic from 1930 in school, the sentence is probably useful: Be careful, you cheaters, you won't save your time just watching the film.
As a guide for the cinema audience, however, it is nonsense. Beyond the duration of consumption, film and book differ considerably. At Kästner, the focus is on a lone fighter who does not want to admit that he has been involved in a fight, by the economic crisis, by fascism. He realizes too late that he cannot keep any of it from his body. Then it pulls him into the deadly vortex of a river, but actually the course of time.
Graf has reconfigured this moralist, as Kästner calls him, into lovers. It consists of the copywriter Jakob Fabian (Tom Schilling), who doesn't expect much from life. Civil interaction between people, a little art, a little fun. And the budding actress Cornelia Battenberg (Saskia Rosendahl), who makes Fabian believe that he can expect a little more from life. Love for example.
The prospect of something better, which Rosendahl's Cornelia leads herself and everyone else to believe, is the core of Graf's drama, and he shapes it wonderfully.
Berlin is not already on the verge of the abyss, as "Babylon Berlin" portrays it in a historically abbreviated way by forcing everything to look towards the "Third Reich".
Graf and his production designer Claus-Jürgen Pfeiffer rather let things and feelings stand side by side.
War invalids and lesbian lovers alike are out and about on their streets, making a city plausible in which the SS deployment is initially just one street scene among many.
The eternal fall of man underlaid with jazz
So it's not completely crazy when Cornelia dreams of a career and a love, of a real life, even though so much is recognizably wrong.
But Cornelia takes the one inexcusable step further, she seduces with her zest for life and her ambition to hope.
And Fabian lets himself be seduced.
Adam and Eve in the Weimar Republic, the eternal fall of man underlaid with jazz.
Economic pressure weighs on everyone in these times and forces them to behave in a compromising manner.
For idealists like Fabian's best friend Labude (Albert Schuch), who is denied his doctorate by the trick of a brown shirt at university, there is little else left than the supposedly heroic bullet in the head.
Only women can really sin in this constellation, and they do it according to the familiar pattern.
For her career as an actress, Cornelia goes to bed with the film producer Makart (Aljoscha Stadelmann).
It falls into a moral trap that an exploitative economy traditionally only places women.
The perfidious thing about it: the fall is reinterpreted as the guilt of women, while men are allowed to suffer most from the guilt of "their" women.
"Bare breasts -> full life"
In Graf's case, a sore heart slowly pulls his Fabian away, while Kästner pushes him out of life with two short sentences, astonishingly casual, completely unsentimental.
His »Fabian«, according to Kästner, should not be a photo album of an era, but rather satire: »The moralist doesn’t hold a mirror in front of his epoch, but rather a distorting mirror.
Caricature, a legitimate artistic medium, is the utmost it can do, «writes Kästner in the foreword to the new edition from 1946.
At the very end, the question arises again, why Graf attached importance to the synchronized length of the book and film.
Wherever he seems to be bound by the book, there is no interesting dialogue;
where it breaks away from it it quickly becomes conservative.
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That doesn't make "Fabian" a bad film, because there is still the independence of the moments, the intensities that are detached from the plot.
And Graf creates this in a density that is still unique in German cinema and television.
Despite three hours of running time, "Fabian" is an entertaining film.
Only Graf's eternal directorial shortcut "bare bosom -> full life" becomes more and more absurd.
Fortunately, in Saskia Rosendahl he has a great actress who has found dignity in every figure - even back then in the schizophrenic aunt who had to sit naked at the family piano in "Werk ohne Autor".
Here, too, she completes the blank drawing again casually confidently.
New German crutch cinema
Nevertheless, this "Fabian" refers to a bigger problem that many German films have.
Cinema in Germany often needs justification outside of the cinema because the unconventionality of moving images is so fundamentally mistrusted.
When television is involved, the prospect of good ratings is such a rationale and formatting for television rather than cinema is the result.
Or there is a reference to popular literature, at best to a classic that justifies why a film is allowed to display its images.
The accumulation of classic films is a kind of crisis marker in German cinema. The end of the innovation spurt in New German Cinema was roughly marked when Volker Schlöndorff's Böll / Grass / Proust adaptations began to dominate the market at the end of the 1970s. Right now we seem to be heading for such a crisis again.
Christian Schwochow's terribly unsuccessful “German lesson” after Lenz was the prelude, Burhan Qurbani's interestingly unsuccessful “Berlin, Alexanderplatz” according to Döblin was the runaway: Next up are film adaptations of Thomas Mann's “The Confessions of the Impostor Felix Krull” (start: September 2nd) and Stefan Zweig's »Schachnovelle« (September 23). None of the films are invited to international festivals, although they are jostling this late summer. If the independence of the images is limited, they obviously cannot speak for themselves either.
Graf's "Fabian" is also a leaned walk to the dogs, one that would have become more interesting if he had broken away from all the conventions of the ultimate justification. But until further notice, the classic film adaptation in German cinema seems to be the crutch for all pictures that cannot run independently.