Dir. Aleksandr Sokurov
Even for those who only know of
the Faust story though the idea of it, a man who signs away his soul to the
Devil, Sokurov's take on it, the
final piece of the legendary director's tetralogy of films that concentrated on
three real world figures (Hitler, Lenin and Hirohito) beforehand, is a bizarre, legitimately bonkers film which
is yet an intellect crafted work about the placement of wisdom and trying to
find meaning in existence that may have no God. The connection to those first
three works immediately brings about issues - having seen two of the three, it's
clear that the issue of power compounded against the ordinary, contradictory behaviour
of human being is shared, with this story being the proto-diagram of the real
life individuals. It still has to be digested how the Faust story, where the
titular character (Johannes Zeiler) needs
money and finds himself pulled into a series of strange events with a demonic
moneylender (Anton Adasinsky), is
turned into this mass of ideas from existential musings to full-on body horror
played as a joke at points as well as being gross. It is almost, if not, a
perverse buddy film where Faust is less of a friend of the moneylender than
dragged behind him in a series of squabbles, pulled into his hands finally when
a youthful beauty Margarete (Isolda
Dychauk) becomes an obsession for Faust. But the moneylender, as the Devil
exists less as an evil being here than a bulbous imp, a literal mass of fat
flesh when you see him completely naked at one stage, acts in all his dealings
with Faust as if it's a normal transaction or deal, or as a comedic buffoon who
wrecks havoc with anything he touches.
Sokurov's film is dense. Long at two hours twenty minutes. A vast,
distinct world of German origin, interpreted
through Russian production, depicted onscreen with a heavy, symbolic tone. But
its dense not because it's a grand scale morality drama - F.W. Murnau did this with his silent adaptation in the twenties -
but because for such a critically lauded auteur, as I slowly get into his work
tiny piece by piece, Sokurov has such
a peculiar film here in the final results. Grotesque definitely, the first
interior image of the film a giant close-up of the penis of a male being cut open
by Faust for research and long passed his mortal coil. That doesn't even begin
to explain what the moneyleader actually looks like naked, or when Faust's assistant
Wagner (Georg Friedrich) brings out a
project he claims to be his to impress Margarete, suddenly evoking Frank Henenlotter in the middle of a
serious, austere film. An austere Russian film which yet clearly plays for laughs
the moneylender entering a church to empty his bowls blasphemously after drinking
the hemlock solution Faust wanted to end his own life with. What Faust as a film means, there's a very
obvious idea that, stripping the pretence, the titular protagonist here is no
longer the Faust of Murnau who wanted
to help people, but wants money, later wants a young, baby faced woman just for
a night at least, having to deal with her mother's clear hatred of his presence,
but despite coming off as a detestable man, eventually shows the human being
who was a professor of great acclaim who finally gets his desire for knowledge
back even if it's too late to save himself. The Sun (2005) and Moloch
(1999), the two films of the tetralogy I've seen, made frank comments that
the characters, Hirohito and Hitler respectively, were human beings, especially
with the later despite his disgusting crimes against humanity. The later film
needs a re-watching for me, but it at times was comedic, Hitler apathetic and only kept awake in life by his love Eva Braun, his minions like Joseph Goebbels bitchy and whiny, making
Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009) not that
different to Sokurov's film in the
mindset of depicting the real life individuals. The Sun, which had actual comedic scenes too, while not showing the
atrocities Japan and America did in World War II, showed a man believed to be
the human incarnation of God for the nation of Japan as a human being, wanting
to know and learn of the world too in his interests, forced to show his nation
he was only of mortal flesh. Faust had the potential to be a great person, but
has yet signed his soul away by the end of this film for the mere ability to
have sex which he later regrets, the most obvious of metaphors but perfect for
being the central pieces of the other three films before it in this series. As
the moneylender points out, a Devil who yet has moments where he is wiser than
anyone else, if Faust cannot help heal people, considering he has medical knowledge,
or console them, he is useless.
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The film is presented as
something very different from most fantasy and art films. Alongside the many
mentioned moments in the review, and ones unmentioned, the film presents itself
in a very unconventional form. Murky while also visually splendorous, moments
in the film are shown through a distorted, tilted camera lens, fitting
something that is both sincere in its prestige seriousness but also close to wading
through literal faecal matter with its fart jokes, pulsating flesh and extreme
distortions of human body parts like genitals. Like Moloch and The Sun, the
serious subject is nonetheless counterbalanced with a far more expansive view
of humanity which can be bizarre and downright vulgar. Faust is extremer in tone and content than those films, but even
with something like Russian Ark (2002),
Sokurov combined very difficult
content to digest with seemingly out-of-absurdities and humour that yet fits
the material and deepens it. Faust
is definitely a difficult film, at its length an immense amount to soak in, but
it succeeds immensely. As much a very potent take on finding meaning in life
through the "comedic" hijinks of Faust and the moneylender as they
visit place to place bickering about each other's beliefs. Its swerve to the
danger of desiring power, through Faust's gamble for love, shows that even in
the simplest wishes, as Sokurov's depictions
of Hitler etc. showed too, people can
damn their souls through their moral failures. It's a weird film, a gruesome
film, abstract when it ends, using Icelandic shooting locations, nearing Max Ernst's landscapes, but as a whole Faust manages to make all of itself
work.
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