Despair is a English-language film by German New Wave enfant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard based on the novel of the same name by Vladimir Nabokov. Starring Dirk Bogarde as a chocolate company owner in Weimar Germany, it is about a half-Jewish chocolate maker named Hermann who attempts to enlist the help of a supposed doppelgaenger (a drifter named Felix, who in fact looks nothing like him) to escape his life. This naturally fails.
Tropes Found in This Film Include:
- Adaptational Dumbass: In the original novel, we do not know if the doppelgaenger actually looks like Hermann because he's an unreliable narrator. Naturally this was impossible to portray in a medium as visual as film. Thus, the protagonist comes across as either much stupider or much crazier.
- The Drifter: Felix, the homeless man who Hermann enlists to impersonate him, counts.
- Herr Doktor: Hermann mistakes an insurance salesman for an Austrian psychiatrist.
- Identical Stranger: Parodied. Though Hermann is certain that the drifter he encounters looks exactly like him, he in fact does not.
