Mark Reviews Movies: FABIAN OR GOING TO THE DOGS

Fabian or Going to the Dogs, Kino Lorber

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 3, 2022

"The wrong people live, and the wrong people die," a character notes near the end of Fabian or Going to the Dogs, a personal and intimate epic set during the interwar period in Germany. That's the lesson of the darkest times of history, so it must be in the build-up to those times. Hindsight of history makes this film, an adaptation of Erich Kästner's novel, an inevitable tragedy, and the strength of co-writer/director Dominik Graf's filmmaking is that this story never feels tragically inevitable.

Some of that sense must come from the source material. It was published in 1931—only two years before Adolf Hitler would be appointed to high office and the horrifying rise of his Nazi Party would begin. The Nazis are present in this film, as they were in the novel, but they are still merely a gang of thugs in brown shirts, exerting more power than they actually have on the street and instilling fear of what they can do with violence—and could do, if given the official opportunity.

Our first sign of their presence comes during the opening shot, a slow and ethereal one-take that takes us through a subway station and out the other side. At first, the period seems to be the present day, given the clothing and the digital video quality of Hanno Lentz's cinematography, but as soon as the camera emerges into the light of the street (and the film stock momentarily shifts), we spot a poster with the twisted swastika on it. The film announces it is 1931, but that initial sense of modernity gives the proceedings a sense of timelessness that, given the current political regression throughout the world, is surely intentional.

Like us potentially, our protagonist Jakob Fabian (Tom Schilling), whom everyone refers to by his surname, isn't aware of the winds of history that will blow his country, Europe, and the entire world toward catastrophe. He works in the advertising branch of a cigarette company, but his heart isn't in the job. He's a scholar of literature by education and, in his ambitions, a writer, but the Weimar Republic is a place of great uncertainty, inflation, poverty, and crime.

Fabian has to work to pay the expensive rent for his room so that he continue to live in the city, in order enjoy going to bars and clubs, which leads him to be constantly be late to work. That gets Fabian fired, after he sarcastically tells his boss that he has, against his contract, taken a second job: living. Since he won't officially be unemployed until the end of the month, a long wait at the benefits office, where he stands around fellow veterans of the Great War who can't find employment, turns out to be useless. Gunfire from a passing car sends the line to the ground and the people wondering if the shots were from the communists or the brown shirts.

That's the social and political backdrop of the tale, and Graf and co-screenwriter Constantin Lieb keep most of that there, making the gradual but inescapable rise of those brown shits even more frightening. They wander the streets at first, are soon seen gaining new members and following certain targets, and, in the film's final shots, have begun burning books the group finds to be worthy of condemnation. This story itself becomes the target of the Nazi's disapproval, just as Kästner's own books did.

Before all of that, though, the film focuses on a series of ongoing and evolving relationships in Fabian's life. Of primary importance is his romance with Cornelia Battenberg (Saskia Rosendahl), a bartender, law student, and aspiring actor. The two meet one night, backstage at a cabaret, as a narrator ticks down the minutes until Fabian's life will change forever (Graf provides two narrators, a man and a woman, who take turns depending on the mood and severity of unfolding events). Flashes of the life Fabian wants or will have with her race across the screen, and in their whirlwind passion, mixed with seemingly genuine compassion and support, the thought never comes that this could be what might have been.

That story unfolds with a fine sense, not of events, but of personal goals and unfortunate miscommunications getting in the way of happiness. There might be more happening behind the scenes, though, given Cornelia's relationship to a movie mogul (played by Aljoscha Stadelmann) of some power and connection.

Unseen forces definitely play into the fate of Fabian's best friend Stephan Labude (Albrecht Schuch), the son of a wealthy attorney (played by Michael Wittenborn), working on his doctoral thesis, turning to the political left (and gaining unwanted attention), and pushing Fabian to write stories of how things are—and how they could be. The other significant relationships are between Fabian and his parents, a worrying mother (played by Petra Kalkutchke) and emotionally distant father (played by Elmar Gutmann), as well as his occasional and coincidental interactions with Irene (Meret Becker), a woman of incessant sexual needs whose rise and fall serve as another warning of what's to come.

It's a warning that most, Fabian included, ignore or don't notice until it's too late—just as our protagonist also misses literal signs that portend but could alter doom. Fabian or Going to the Dogs takes its time to explore and dissect this place and period from assorted angles, and the result is that the story's assorted tragedies take on the weight of the social, the political, and, above all, the personal.

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