Fabian: Going to the Dogs (Dominik Graf, 2021) (Patreon)

Nothing in Dominik Graf's latest film is as exciting as its first ten minutes. In the opening sequence of Fabian, Graf and cinematographer Hanno Letz take us through the tunnels of a U-bahn station in present day, the camera gliding past present-day commuters. As the camera floats up the stairs and out of the station, we see posters for the 1931 election which will end the Weimar Republic, sweeping the Nazis to power. Graf is not only making a point about the nature of period pieces and historical cinema, displaying the careful maneuvering necessary to generate the illusion of the past. He is also suggesting that Germany's past and present are unavoidably linked. Although Graf's gesture is not as radical as, say, Christian Petzold's unstable mix of time periods in Transit, the director nevertheless emphasizes that it is impossible to reconstitute the past without our own underlying awareness of the contemporary world we inhabit.

Soon, we meet Jakob Fabian (Tom Schilling), a university dropout who is currently working in the advertising industry. Soon, he will lose this job, and in the brief period covered by the film he will not take up another. For the most part, Fabian is defined by drift. He is an unmoored individual working to make sense of his turbulent surroundings, reasonably content to let the life around him impress itself upon his consciousness. To paraphrase Christopher Isherwood, Fabian is a camera, and his personal and political investments only emerge when it is far too late.

He is ostensibly a writer. His old school friend Stephane Labude (Albrecht Schuch) believes Fabian has the period's definitive novel inside him just waiting to emerge. But unlike Alfred Döblin, or for that matter Erich Kästner (author of the 1931 novel on which Graf's film is based), Fabian is too uncommitted to actually chronicle his perceptions. In the end, we see his notebook, filled with random notes and observations, but there is no order, no governing ethos to give his thoughts a shape. This, Kästner and Graf seem to suggest, was the great tragedy of Weimar. The modern freedoms available to this generation between the wars were driven not by radical ideology but by reactivity. And this seems to be one of the defining aspects of Graf's Fabian. We can perhaps see ourselves in the culture of Weimar, with its frustrated intellectuals, ambivalence toward private property, and above all its free-flowing queer sexuality. But for so many of these young people, this milieu represents the absence of meaning, rather than a conscious set of ideals to be articulated and defended. 

Floating alongside Fabian and Stephane is Cornelia Battenberg (Saskia Rosendahl), a spirited young woman who aspires to be an actress. Cornelia likes Fabian, precisely because he is so ill-defined. While it is a bit surprising when she abandons him to take up with a much-older movie producer (Aljoscha Stadelmann) who promises to make her a star, it's also understandable. Like Fabian, Cornelia took lessons from the Great War that were primarily solipsistic. Life is too short to compromise, and far too fleeting for the bonds of commitment. Even Stephan, the character whose beliefs are the most defined -- he's a socialist from a wealthy family, working hard to spurn the ideals of his father's generation -- becomes dissolute and drug-addled. 

There is no larger plot, no clear future. Every sensation is momentary, a jolt out of  anesthetized non-consciousness. Stephan's respected literary professor (Michael Hanemann) decrees that "everything is going to the dogs" and "we need a new order," and if we didn't know what that was going to mean, we might be inclined to agree