Critic Reviews

Its characters are suffused with a paradoxical kind of fear that can only happen in a dream, the dread before an immense catastrophe that’s unavoidable because it’s already happened.

The film’s freewheeling dynamism and stylistic elasticity allow Fabian to shake off the stuffier tropes of historical drama.

Fabian: Going to the Dogs is poetic, ugly, romantic, tragic, and side-splitting. Some sequences approach the edge of sanity, take a glimpse into the abyss, then the plot reassembles itself – but the threat of derailing remains, and it’s quite exhilarating.

Graf makes “Going to the Dogs” an unpredictable visual experience, bracingly experimental for a 68-year-old filmmaker who hasn’t run out of gas.

It takes some getting used to, and there are sequences more awkward in their motley-ness than pointed. But overall, it’s an effectively crashing intimacy created by the performances (especially the fizz and warmth Schilling and Rosendahl have together), Claudia Wolscht’s restless editing and Hanno Lentz’s camerawork.

Fabian – Going to the Dogs is well-meaning, but Schilling’s portrayal of Fabian is a poor symbol for this malaise.

Graf has spent most of his long career as a director of TV series and movies, and much of the staging lacks great originality. But this is made up for, in part, by the striking way the story of Jakob and his friends is told mixing the narrative drama with now old-fashioned “modernist” tech devices borrowed from the past.

Erich Kästner’s slim novel originally translated in 1932 as “Fabian. The Story of a Moralist” is a brilliantly astute rendering of life in Weimar Berlin, straightforward and yet surreal, witty and perverse. To tackle it in cinema would seem like an impossible task, and while Dominik Graf’s Fabian – Going to the Dogs is to be commended for getting quite a lot right, the movie is blowsy where the book is succinct, awkwardly paced and portentous where Kästner is consistently rhythmical and unpretentious.

A tram here, a car there, a little attention to wardrobe, and contrasting haircuts (a Hitler/Himmler buzz was the dead give-away somebody was a Nazi) and we get an idea of what this world looked like. But “Fabian” fails to immerse us in that world, and being as leisurely as a limited series in its pacing, loses the urgency of what to later audiences can only be a “cautionary” tale.