Faust (2011)

Wonderful character development!

An absolute waste of money

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

"Faust" is a film loosely based on the classic novel of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In it, a scholar, desperately looking to find a meaning in life, meets the devil and agrees on an unholy pact that will bring him the love of a beautiful young lady in exchange for his soul.As mentioned above, this is by no means identical to the text it is based upon. Surely you could criticize this, but in my opinion it is of no harm for the movie, rather it adds some uniqueness. The general mood is very dark and sinister, with quite a few ugly scenes, which helps to draw the audience into the environment of the play and shows the desperation and the consequences of the pact in heavy pictures. I like how the filmmakers played with some of the well-known sentences from the text, even though I found it a bit confusing to quote Luther in this context. At times the camera lengthens the frame a bit, which is not my cup of tea but I guess there are people who will like it.All in all this is a very well adaption, especially because it is brave enough to be sinister and add own thoughts. This way, the film is not just one in a million of Faust-based plays but it stands out and works for itself.

The 2011-film Faust was one of the big awards players outside of Hollywood. It is not the first Sokurov movie in German, her made one in 1999 already in a movie series where "Faust" is already the fourth entry. He is one of the most famous Russian directors right now and has been especially present at the Palme d'Or film festival in the past. And he is also a writer for the movies he makes, such as this one. Personally, I feel this film looks much older than not even 5 years ago.The main character is played by Johannes Zeiler and he looks a bit like Ralph Fiennes. Mephisto (or the Moneylender) has not acted in movies after this one here, but I read he has his own theater, so he's probably pretty active nonetheless. Apart from them, there are several (known) German actors in here, such as Hanna Schygulla or also Antje Lewald who I saw first in the Campers TV show. The film runs for considerably over two hours and is of course about the Goethe work, but still several steps are in-between. It is based on Yuriy Arabov's adaptation and was altered again by Sokurov into the final version. I am not too sure how close it is still to Goethe's work as it's been too long since we had it at school, but the three central characters are obviously all there.All in all, I was not too impressed and sometimes I even felt it dragged, so I would not really recommend watching it unless you love story and are really curious about this adaptation.

It begins with the evisceration of a corpse, and that could be a metaphor for the way this alleged adaptation proceeds - except that Goethe's "Faust" is not dead, only given the dead-letter treatment here. The film's emphasis is on gross, clumsy physicality: you never saw so many actors stumble as they walk, bumping into things and one another; too artless and unfunny for slapstick, the universal jostling is prevented from being laughable by funereal pacing and the array of hangdog faces. Since the Faust figure (Johannes Zeiler) conveys very little in the way of intellect, all that elevates him is that most of the other characters have been made open-mouthed gapers, presumable halfwits. Wit is barred out anyway by the color-palette, all various hues of mud - the surest sign of high-serious intentions in movies nowadays. In exterior shots the sky is overexposed so it shows as a gleamless white blur; the earth is dun-colored, greens are gray-tinged, and reds are virtually absent, on their rare appearance tending to brown, like bloodstained linens oxidizing. The cut of the men's clothing updates the story to several decades after Goethe's time: trousers are worn, rather than breeches and hose. The fabrics are thick, heavy, coarse, and of course dark-dyed and fraying badly. No one could think of playing the dandy here. Strangely, there seems to be no Republic of Letters either. The few characters with intellectual interests neither write nor receive letters; they're isolated from enlightenment and worldly affairs: no one awaits the postman; no one looks at a journal of science or politics or the arts - this is a stupefying omission, as false to the historical period as it would be to Goethe's own. Sokurov's flight from historical particulars strands his Faust: the fable and the character become "timeless" in all the wrong ways. Faust doesn't represent his age's high hopes, or its seeds of self-destruction; but then he doesn't represent our age either. Sealed off in its remoteness, Sokurov's "Faust" is just another - all-too-familiar - sulking, glooming art-house reverie.

FAUST tries a bit too hard at times to shock, or to impress with its technical aspect: the opening close-up of the rotting genitalia of a male cadaver being autopsied pretty much sets the tone; anything goes. Unfortunately, that includes some fairly simple but overused in-camera effects, like the use of distorting lenses (which add absolutely nothing to the meandering narrative and actually detract from the lavish production values). Death, himself, is a bore who waddles around in a rubber fat suit "weighing souls." "Is the world too cramped for you?" someone asks at one point. It's a question I pondered even as I watched this one unfold: having spent far too much of my time watching experimental films and video over the years, I can honestly say that- for ME- the world IS cramped with far too many such films.