Vladimir Nabokov's novel is adapted by Tom Stoppard into an icy, psycho-melodramatic nightmare in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1978 film, now on rerelease in a restored print. Dirk Bogarde dominates the screen in superbly ironic, fastidious, self-lacerating form, variously appearing in clean-shaven, moustached and full-bearded guises. He plays Hermann, an émigré Russian businessman in 1930s Berlin, uneasy about his Jewish roots with Nazis on the rise, and living in a elaborately furnished apartment with his wife Lydia (Andréa Ferréol) with whose bizarre sex-kitten mannerisms and lack of refinement he is exasperated yet infatuated. This elegant Hermann is to end his career as a twitchy, dishevelled fugitive from the law in various lakeside Swiss hotels: in these film's final scenes, Fassbinder may have intended a droll reminder of Nabokov's own death, one year before this film was made, after years of living in a lakeside Swiss hotel. Hermann's downfall begins with a mental crisis, and a bizarre plan to collect life insurance by killing a stranger whom he (wrongly) believes to be his exact double. On the page, the absurd dissimilarity between Hermann and his "double" is not obvious. In a film, there is a loss of subtlety, but in abolishing the twist, and shifting the point-of-view, Fassbinder gives the story a clinical and macabre quality: we can see, quite clearly and as it were in slow motion, Hermann's mental catastrophe and the quasi-suicide implicit in this doppelgänger-murder. At the film's conclusion, Artaud, Van Gogh and Unica Zürn are acknowledged: the names of Grosz and Magritte also come to mind. Its subtitle is A Journey Into Light. But that is not where this journey's heading. A superb surrealist noir.