Despair (1978): Cast, Box Office & Plot

Hermann Hermann Dirk Bogarde lives in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. A refugee from Soviet Russia, with a Baltic German father and a wealthy Jewish mother, he has inherited a business making chocolates. His wife Lydia Hermann Andréa Ferréol, voluptuous but not intelligent, has an over-close relationship with her bachelor cousin, the painter Ardalion Volker Spengler. As the Great Depression bites and Nazi thugs start targeting Jewish businesses, his firm becomes less profitable and Germany feels less hospitable, and Hermann begins to dream of escape. He already experiences moments of leaving his body—watching himself make love to his wife—and he consults a man he believes to be a Viennese psychiatrist but is in fact a life insurance salesman, who sells him a policy.