Fabian: Going to the Dogs First Draft

Complete first draft for Film Comment.

Dominik Graf represents nothing less than an alternate vision of modern German cinema. Far from the rarified heights of the loose collective of filmmakers like Maren Ade, Thomas Arslan, and Angela Schanelec that make up the Berlin School, or even the more popular but still politics-forward work of the New German Cinema, Graf has staked his claim as the foremost purveyor of genre films. Since his ambitious crime epic The Invincibles (1994), whose bleak outlook was rejected by a post-unified Germany unwilling to engage with the corruption already set within the system, he has worked mostly in television, having directed more than seventy films over a forty-three year career. Whether it be standalone works or contributions to long-running series like Tatort or its ex-East German counterpart Polizeiruf 110, Graf has consistently applied a singularly dynamic style that goes hand-in-hand with his ever-shifting command of character relationships, incorporating motifs and images that resonate across not only the film at hand, but his prolific body of work at large. Owing partly to financing reasons and partly to his own preference for television, which offers him an outlet to explore genre amid the conventions of a crime series, Graf frequently goes years without making a theatrical film. His most recent effort, Fabian: Going to the Dogs, is his first since Beloved Sisters (2014), probably his most famous work internationally; both are almost-three-hour period films that premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, a platform rarely available for his crime television movies. Fabian is an adaptation of the 1931 novel by Erich Kästner, which was released under the originally intended title (and the film’s subtitle) in 2013, a telling alteration that speaks directly to the changing currents that would run towards Nazism. Jakob Fabian himself (Tom Schilling) represents one of the sticks in the mud, an aspiring writer living in 1931 Berlin mired in unemployment. Fabian revolves around his relationships with his lover, Cornelia Battenberg (Saskia Rosendahl), an international film lawyer seeking to become an actress, and his close friend Stephan Labude, a son of a wealthy lawyer who is attempting to become a professor while also remaining enmeshed in political agitation. Like many Graf films, including Beloved Sisters, his contribution to the Dreileben TV film trilogy alongside Christian Petzold and Christoph Hochhäusler, and his Henry James television adaptation The Friends of the Friends (2002), it situates itself along this quasi-love triangle; while, as in the latter film, the third end of the triangle only fleeting meets the object of desire, the implicit link between them in their ties to the main character provides a crucial structure to the film, two separate points of focus that Graf moves fluidly between. For Fabian, in typical Graf fashion, resonates as both a fully fleshed-out (in multiple senses of the world) personal drama and a grand portrait of the times, observing as a Weimar Germany still reeling from World War I descends into moral decay ready to be seized upon by the forces of fascism. Graf’s work is distinguished from that of Petzold, perhaps his closest internationally known compatriot, by dint of his full-fledged commitment to the former, allowing the subtext to flow freely from the text, which, despite the length, comes across as raucously as any of his past films. His handheld, rapid-cutting style is augmented here by extensive use of archival footage, an intervention that widens the film’s world as surely as Graf’s assured handling of supporting characters, who unexpectedly dance in and out of prominence. The extended ending hearkens back to both Beloved Sisters and The Friends of the Friends, while the historical coda, a chapter closing on dreams deferred, is Fabian’s own; the juxtaposition of these two elements gets to the core of Graf’s still underexplored brilliance.