Faust

Really not a movie that you would have for breakfast and digest by dinner time. I got the impression that Sokurov was trying to cram as many of the ideas from Goethe’s masterpiece as possible into two hours, highlighting “his” themes (death, corporeality, the passage of time), while giving the actors enough space. There is no silence or empty space for contemplation. Wherever the protagonist goes, someone accompanies him, something is happening around him. This is even more apparent after the devil (characteristically a moneylender by trade) becomes his guide, deliberately causing chaos. Even the visually enchanting walk taken by Faust and Margarete is disrupted at least by the voices of other characters. The density of sounds, images and ideas evokes in the viewer and in Faust the same desire, a longing for peace and quiet. Like the questions that are raised, the direction of the narrative is determined by his search. Given the corruption of the world, there is only one way to recognise good, if it exists – through evil. It is necessary to begin with that, with the shallow, disgusting and malodorous. With the ubiquitous. The diversion from the path of science and faith to dangerous doubts is “materialised” by replacing the spiritually oriented father with a man who reeks of death. The bodies of Faust and the father and of Faust and the devil almost merge in some shots through close physical contact – constant and not always welcome physical contact with others, constant pushing and rubbing, creates an impressive contrast to the purity of the relationship between the doctor and Margarete, when the touches are tender and desirable. The predominant naturalism in the depiction of filthy reality gives rise to magical-realistic scenes that are bizarre in the manner of Lynch (a vagina, homunculus) and combine the worlds of the known and the unknowable. The world of male rationality and the world of a mysterious woman, between which lost souls are guided by the genderless devil. The use of the space’s geometry and the frequent descents and ascents comprise the main and least ostentatious indicator of transitions between dreams and reality. Optical deformations of the picture play a similar role on the visual level, raising the suspicion that the projectionist has incorrectly loaded the film in the projector (or that it is a mirror reflection). The turning of attention to the medium itself can be understood as the director challenging us to accept the deformed rules of the world created and controlled by him, which serves primarily for verbal philosophical disputation. This of course does not mean that there are not images that defy any kind of verbal description (in the landscape of medium shots “radiating” a close-up of Margarete’s face). It is not possible to capture Goethe’s Faust in brief; Sokurov’s Faust is similarly ungraspable and, for anyone who has yet to be sufficiently educated by life, equally incomprehensible. 80% (02.07.2012)

The greatest strength of the film is its greatest weakness: the counterpoint of matter and spirit, body and soul. The materiality of the body brilliantly intrudes into Sokurov’s otherwise typical slow flow and into lyrical classical/preromantic images. The repulsive bloated body of Mephisto amidst female purity in the beginning; Margarete’s beauty gradually ending in a shot of the vulva: the symbol of the gradual disturbance of the balance between soul and body, and the reduction of what is noble in a man (his disgust for God) to an animal (non)essence. Who introduced imbalance and Sin into the world of balance between soul and body? Who abandoned patient asceticism of knowledge, and who exchanged the promise of a constantly advancing future of science for one night with Margarete? The answer is also the answer to the question of why this typically religious interpretive framework is the film's greatest drawback: unlike Goethe's masterpiece, it completely flattens Faust's story into a Manichaean struggle between soul and matter - only Mephisto can come from the body, matter, and sex. Faust is no longer a self-destructive hero who has already achieved everything in knowledge and who joins forces with the devil to know even more, and thus he must also know what escapes science. Now he is just an impatient and defeated renegade of spiritual work, who succumbed to desire and ended up in a barren desert on his journey for bodily pleasures, which means the death of the body and the spirit. Sokurov's Days of Eclipse also took place in a desert, but the direction was the opposite: detachment from a filthy reality led upwards... here, falling away from God is inevitable. Therefore, the review must also be less. (28.04.2017)

An interesting adaptation of the classic, which is, on one hand, historically fairly accurate in the sense that there are indeed well-crafted sets and you get a clear sense of the time period. But on the other hand, it's also a film that has its dreamlike elements and works in that regard as well. Even so, that doesn't mean I actually enjoyed it, which is reflected in my rating. (10.12.2016)