Films about German history can easily degenerate into boring school lessons. The best counter-example is Fabian or The Walk to the Dogs. With his adaptation of the novel by Erich Kästner, Dominik Graf has one over three hour long whirlwind of a movie created, which inspires with unbelievable stylistic rage, great feelings and bitter tragedy.
Arte broadcasts the German masterpiece of 2021 on Friday evening at 8:15 p.m. as a German free TV premiere. It is also already available in the media library. Either way, Fabian is an incomparable film intoxication.
Fabian is a firework of style with touching depth
The main character in Graf’s adaptation is the young Jakob Fabian. During the day, the German studies graduate works as a bored copywriter, at night he keeps getting lost in the Excesses of Berlin nightlife in the early 1930s.
Above all, the director adapts Fabian’s first half hour to the rhythm of this lifestyle. Ultra-grain Super 8 recordings are replaced by shaky digital HD images and the soundtrack becomes so chaotic and overloaded that many dialogues can hardly be understood like in a loud bar. This overwhelming firework of style is rounded off by zooms, cut black-and-white images and a party sequence that is broken up into several split screens.
After a while, however, Fabian calms down and the film turns from an intoxicating portrayal of manners into a sensitive love story. Always in the apocalyptic shadow of approaching National Socialism. There is also the great trio of Tom Schilling as Fabian, Saskia Rosendahl as Cornelia and Albrecht Schuch as Fabian’s best friend Labude.
With the figures in the center, Graf shows in a very modern way people who fail in their ideals or despair, who stagger disoriented to the point of falling over the abyss or who are condemned to loneliness. In a timeless way, the historical material is also very modern. With all these facets, Fabian or the Dog Walk can already be celebrated as a modern masterpiece of German cinema.
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