The interwar period seems to have made the same demand across the Euroamerican world: burn your candle at both ends, for calamity is on the way. In New York, the the Jazz Age roared; in Paris, the Années went folles; and in Weimar Berlin, that stony city of cabarets and slinking shadows, the Happy Years — Glückliche Jahre — were swiftly severed by the vertiginous ascent of the Nazi Party. In his most recent film, the woozy Fabian: Going to the Dogs, German maestro of the crime and police serial Dominik Graf flexes every formal muscle in the book to convey the ambivalence of these years. On the one hand, the film tortures its subjects — and to some extent, its viewers — with barrages of anxious energy and subaltern menace; on the other, it’s a party, its high-flung rejection of unity and convention catapulting its viewers into an unfettered, hedonistic joy.
Fabian pulls no visual punches; early in the film — which follows the loves and thrills of the unemployed writer Jakob Fabian (Tom Schilling) in 1930s Berlin — the almost always handheld camera swings ferociously on a loose axis, zooms sharply into its characters’ sweaty and umbrous faces, and careens in fits and starts through dusky bar hallways and cobblestoned alleyways. Its portrait of the city combines grainy archival footage, narration from both masculine and feminine voices, freeze frames, picture-in-picture editing, maps, even silent-film-style intertitles. Name a technique and Graf employs it to highly disorienting effect. Fabian’s style is thus marked by a constant, irrepressible instability in all elements of its construction, be it narrative, spatial, perspectival, or musical. In its first great sucker punch, the film’s title sequence of first-person shaky-cam and heavy rock in the contemporary Berlin metro shifts into the swinging, sleazy dankness of a Weimar-era cabaret, Fabian devouring a woman in his arms. Harmony of time, place, tone: nothing is sacred.
There is great potential here for Fabian to bury itself in its own formal avalanche, but Graf knows when to hold back. Its brief moments of stillness — few and far between as they may be, though increasingly prevalent when Fabian encounters love in the equally troubled Cornelia (Saskia Rosendahl) — are extraordinarily special, giving breathing space to an otherwise breathless cinematic rampage. A Campari orange sunrise, the tinkling of a crystal table lamp, these little crumbs of peace lift the film’s weight as preemptive balms to the coming onslaught.
Great tonal shifts like these, accompanied by the camera’s frenzy and the edit’s instability, strike at the heart of Fabian’s greatest insight: its representation of Weimar Berlin as a highly emotional and agitated social space. A sense of anxiety undergirds the film’s every moment, Schilling depicting Fabian with a rootless unease as he flits between the city’s seedy locales. Meanwhile, the camera subjects him to a gaze almost torturous, cranking its zoom in and out on his disturbed face and checking him from every angle with a panoptic oppression. In this way, Fabian’s formal experimentations grant the city and its denizens a profound volatility; something is wrong… but what? There are, fortunately, simple answers: inflation, unemployment, war guilt — all the common forms of socioeconomic malaise that opened the door for the Nazi rise to power. But these issues do not dominate Fabian; Nazi brownshirts appear on the street and threats of imprisonment dog Fabian’s leftist friend Labude (Albrecht Schuch), but the film’s Berlin is a place of a more unplaceable and turbulent nausea.
But it’s pretty fun, too. Cabarets, dancers in feather boas, flowing schnapps; this is, after all, not only a pre- but also a post-war period, and the good people of Berlin are going to live a little. Fabian’s brazen rejection of all expected narrative and structural conventions not only expresses the queasiness of a society on the brink, but also the euphoria. Like a sloppy night out, it’s a joyous flirtation with danger, a romp in ruins not yet bombed into existence. Other films might drown in such mania and dread, but happily Fabian rolls, porcine, in the Weimar mud. Celebration, dismay, the roiling fascist threat under the surface, and a city with foundations made irreparably loose — talk about zeitgeist.
