Subtitles:

English (SDH), English, none

Extras:

Sokurov’s protagonist, Heinrich Faust (Johannes Zeiler) is an early-19th-century middle-European anatomist who believes that the human soul can be located within the body, messily dissecting corpses to justify his theories. His intellectual arrogance is challenged by Mauricius (Anton Adasinsky), the town’s wheedling moneylender, who dismisses Faust’s preoccupations with an airy “The soul? One can do without it. Why complicate things?” (Perhaps echoing Walter Huston’s Mr Scratch in The Devil and Daniel Webster [1941]: “Soul? Soul is nothing… Can you see it? Smell it? Touch it? No…”) Mauricius, whose imperious wife (Euro art-film legend Hanna Schygulla) waltzes around in an array of operatically excessive costumes – is never named as ‘Mephistopheles’ here, but he obviously fills the role of Goethe/Marlowe’s Satanic tempter. His bargain involves granting Faust carnal access to virginal damsel Gretchen (Isolda Dychauk), a character often named ‘Marguerite’ in previous iterations. Arguably Sokurov’s trump card, saturnine Dychauk is such a luminous screen presence that one might imagine a mature, intelligent scientist like Faust trading his eternal soul for a night in her bed.

Several things about Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov’s German-language spin on the Faust legend – the fourth and final part of his tetralogy of films about power and evil after ‘Moloch’, ‘The Sun’ and ‘Taurus’ – make it a difficult, even alienating experience. It’s talky. It’s often rambling. It has a rigorous, even unrelenting, grey, green and brown palette and, narratively, it’s tough to penetrate.

But, still, this ‘Faust’, which won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2011 and is set in an indistinct time and place – presumably somewhere in Germany roundabout the nineteenth century – has a sly humour and down-to-earth mystery that make it cumulatively compelling and allow the themes of the story to burrow deep within the viewer. Moreover, the film’s look gradually takes on a hypnotic power as Sokurov’s constantly travelling camera offers images blurred at the edges, sometimes tilted and with the occasional arresting close-up, such as when he halts on the beautiful, brightly lit face of Faust’s love, Margarete (Isolda Dychauk), and the source of his pact with the devil.

Gary Tooze

August 10th, 2012