In the taxi, Gudrun told me she was writing a novel. It was to be all about America, from the viewpoint of a European woman. It would be called The Money Farm (what else?). "I don't know if the title sounds so good in English. In German it sounds just right to my ear. The story is about an intellectual woman living in America with a racing car driver. She does not understand him because he is not intellectual and so on. They start in New York and go to Las Vegas. It is written in short scenes. No chapters, just extra white space. Like in a film – oh, what is the word? In German we call it schnitt."

"Cuts?"

"Yes," she said, surprised.

I told her I had recently published a novel. She asked me avidly how often I wrote, how many hours and pages a day, whether I made outlines. After each answer I gave, she became more insecure. She confessed she had never written a novel before and was probably not doing it right. I tried to reassure her that there was no "right way" to do a novel, that each time one was in the dark. I sensed that she was both discounting my words and secretly holding onto them.

*

The taxi to Lincoln Center got us there ahead of time, and in our seats waiting for the film to begin she told me her life story. She had been a sensitive child, had written poems from early on, had done a little modeling and acting but decided to become a journalist "for practical reasons," had married young and gotten divorced, had come to America to make big money but all she had gotten was the runaround. Now she wanted to go back. But not until she finished her novel. "I am at an age where I must make a success."

"How old are you?" I asked.

"Thirty-five."

"The same as me. That's not so old. Why must you have a success just now?"

"Because I am living in a country where I don't feel I belong. And my child is back in Germany. She is ten years old and I want to join her. But it's difficult, because of the father. And I don't communicate well with Emil. And for many other reasons."

She looked unhappy, momentarily overwhelmed by her life. The lights dimmed. I would have liked to know how solid this discontent with her boyfriend was, but I didn't dare allow myself to think of it as an invitation. At stage-front, Richard Roud, the festival director, introduced Fassbinder, who said a few words in sweet, halting English, ending with the obligatory "I hope you will like the film."

In fact, Despair was awful.

So awful that I probably would have left in the middle, were I by myself. Moreover, it was the first time I had failed to be charmed by Fassbinder. Oh, I'd seen weaker Fassbinders before (Chinese Roulette, Jailbait, Satan's Brew), but each had at least offered the pleasure of watching a minor work by a major director and enjoying the signature of his orderly style flowing through the chaotic, sloppy ruins. Indeed, some of my favorite Fassbinders were precisely the rawer or more plotless ones, when characters lurched around wasting time in an interesting way: Beware of a Holy Whore, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, In a Year of Thirteen Moons. The problem with Despair was that it did not feel, properly speaking, like a Fassbinder picture. It was a European Art Film, slickly shot, polished, with high production values – but no soul. Working from such seemingly highbrow material, a Tom Stoppard script adapted from the Nabokov novel, the director seemed lost, like a maître d' at a fancy restaurant, left with nothing to do but seat people. The first half of the movie was taken up with shooting the characters through lamps and glass partitions, against frosted glass walls, amidst every art deco prop imaginable. John Grierson once remarked, à propos von Sternberg, that when a filmmaker deteriorates he becomes a photographer. In Fassbinder's case, the temptation was to become an art director.

One reason the film lacked the proper Fassbinder tone was that it was in English; perhaps I was being snobbish in missing the exotic distancing of the German tongue. Another reason was the fetishistically tony way its international star, Dirk Bogarde, was employed, in a congealed parody of Visconti's and Losey's earlier, sexually ambiguous use of him. It did not help matters that Bogarde was called upon to fake a Russian accent, nor made to writhe randily yet distastefully in elegant dressing gown over a plump, naked Andrea Ferreol, whose fleshy corpulence the director seemed to mock. So much dialogue in the early reels was taken up with the hero calling his wife "a stupid woman" and a "featherbrain," and she concurring with this judgment (while cuckolding him with her "cousin"), that it was hard not to scent misogyny. This time I felt alienated from Fassbinder's overall sensibility: he seemed to be portraying heterosexuality itself as a vulgar, tacky prejudice.

The secret of Fassbinder's dramatic power had always been the underground sympathy he showed for his otherwise messed-up characters; but this time there was no sympathy, only chilly mannerism. Bogarde plays a rich, jaded Russian, Herman Herman, who owns a chocolate factory. Neurotically detached from himself and his life, he meets a worker named Felix, who is broad-shouldered and endomorphic, but whom Herman deludedly believes is the spit-and-image of himself. As in Hitchcock's Stranger on a Train, the two men seem to merge identities, with homoerotic undertones. Herman kills Felix and exchanges his clothing with the corpse, thinking he can assume the dead man's life as well. But of course, looking nothing like the victim, he is tracked down by the police, and the film ends with a Norman Bates-like voiceover monologue delivered by the madman to the camera.

All this occurs against a rise-of-Nazism backdrop, which seems present more as costume opportunity – Weimar decadent chic – than serious political commentary. Amidst the deadeningly cynical reversals, the only feeling of any kind seems reserved for the scenes between Bogarde's Herman and the proletarian Felix (Klaus Lowitsch). The plot, while admittedly clever, is also so far-fetched, so sterilely "playful," that Fassbinder cannot settle down to telling it; his camera, usually so patient, roams over the natty decor like a restless shopper. The film itself ends up a box of (bitter) chocolates.

I cast about for some way to excuse my directorial idol. Perhaps it was the big budget: Fassbinder's vitality came out strongest when improvising on the cheap. Or was it the script? – that Stoppard was all too crafty, I never liked Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, he'd tricked Fassbinder into playing his academic illusion-and-reality games the way that other British playwright, David Mercer, had crippled poor Alain Resnais in Providence. Or maybe it was excessive reverence for Nabokov's text: Fassbinder's crude power matched up poorly with the subtle, devious Russian master. And surely Bogarde's arched-eyebrow performance deserved some blame; fine actor though he was, he needed sitting on. But in the end, the fault rested with Fassbinder. I wondered if he had exhausted the personal in his previous year's masterpiece, In a Year of Thirteen Moons – gone so far in the direction of honesty that he could only retreat to this smoothly mannerist, armored style.

*

When we stood up, Gudrun slipped her cinnamon tweed jacket over her tapioca satin blouse. I noticed that a) she was very beautiful, with that remarkable golden hair; and b) her cheeks looked puffy. Could she have been so moved by that tripe?

"What did you think?" I asked.

"Well – I am afraid to say, not very good!"

"A total mess. Fassbinder's worst," I declared. We were relieved to agree. As we left the theater, I asked self-consciously, "Would you like to go somewhere for a drink?"

"Yes, why not?" she answered, but somberly; she seemed preoccupied, re-absorbed in her problems. She told me she must fly tomorrow to Las Vegas to research the novel and write an article on American gambling for a German magazine. "This editor is a total swine."

We walked a block or two to O'Neals' Balloon, and just as we were about to go inside, she stopped at the revolving doors, as if trying to remember something.

"I must go home because my teeth are hurting. I have had root canal today, and it still feels very sore. Did you ever have root canal?"

"No," I said, "but it must be painful." I put her in a yellow taxi, telling her to have a good time in Las Vegas, and walked home thinking, root canal – that's a new one.