Alexander Sokurov (2011)
The screenplay – by the director, Marina Koreneva and Yuri Arabov – draws both on Goethe and on Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. The film, in German, is set in the early nineteenth century (in other words, in Goethe’s own lifetime) and Alexander Sokurov’s realisation of this world is very fine. He conveys an overpowering sense of the physical basis of human life. Faust’s interior monologues reflect a mind grappling with the realities of appetency, of flesh and blood and bodily stench. Death is everywhere – in the mortuary, in the alleyways of the neighbourhood, and inside Faust’s head. The predominating earth colours in the cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel’s palette help to reinforce both the physical insistency of this world and its transience. Yet Faust apprehends or wants to apprehend, in spite of the evidence of his senses, a spiritual dimension to existence – in an early scene, we watch him literally searching for the human soul in the body parts of a corpse – and Sokurov weaves into his startlingly carnal universe images and movements, of animals, birds and sometimes people, which are unnervingly sudden and supernatural. At the very start of the film, the camera moves from what seems an extraterrestrial viewpoint towards a landscape – are the white things fluttering about a mountainside seagulls or sheets of paper?
Sokurov, with the help of Delbonnel, maintains momentum by continuing, through the 134 minutes of the film, to create remarkable moving pictures – like the sequence in which the local women bathe and are joined in their ablutions by a hideously naked Mephistopheles. The rolls of decaying (prosthetic) flab on his body are powerfully disgusting – they suggest putrid bandages as much as decaying flesh. Faust very strongly visualises life as a largely unvarying, inescapably narrow passage. Its limitation is that it’s dramatically monotonous too – it doesn’t really build. As Faust, Johannes Zeiler has broad, rather coarse features but you see a mind working through them – Zeiler is well cast as a man struggling between physical and mental planes of existence. Anton Adasinsky’s Mephistopheles – in the human form of a moneylender called Mauritius Müller – is a genuinely disturbing creature, although his grossly distended belly and huge hips and backside look more and more like padding as the film goes on. The very pretty Isolde Dychuk, as Gretchen, is good at registering this young woman’s distaste for Faust, who lusts after her. The only actor I recognised was Hanna Schygulla as the moneylender’s wife. Because I recognised her, I was conscious of her acting in a way I wasn’t with the rest of the cast; but Schygulla is, as usual, very strong – she’s able to make her character both typical and individual.
20-26 May 2012
