I love this movie so much

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

I came to know quite late the works of the Russian director Alexander Sokurov, and I cannot say I know them well today either. The first one I have seen was Russian Ark, a splendid exercise in virtuosity, composition and visual beauty, but lacking almost completely any epic structure. Next came the 3rd film in his tetralogy about men and power, The Sun which had emperor Hirohito in his days of defeat at the end of WWII as main hero. Now I have seen the 4th film in the series, a very different, special and personal version of the story of Faust. I am yet to see the first two films in the same series which deal with the portraits of Hitler and Lenin, as well as other of his works that drew the attention of audiences and critics like 'Father and Son'. So the impressions here are to be seen as partial notes on my route of better knowing one of the major artists in modern cinema. I am yet to form a dependency for his work or to declare admiration for the director, but I may get there some day.On many respects this 'Faust' is close to 'Russian Ark'. It is one of the most beautiful and complex pieces of visual art that I have seen lately and I cannot skip mentioning here in this context the name of the director of photography Bruno Delbonnel author of such other wonderfully filmed works like 'Amélie' or 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince'. Sokurov creates a world of his own with hundred of characters, costumes, and behaviors studied and acted to the smallest detail. The world is a synthesis not only of the German world at the time Goethe wrote the original story but of all that was Europe from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. It can happen and it actually happens at any of the moments in that period.Sokurov takes inspiration from the work of Goethe but does not follow it closely. This film is certainly not Goethe's Faust, it is at best 'inspired' by it. It is Sokurov's Faust before all - a work about a man, a scientist and a philosopher searching for the sense of life, mired by an incarnation of the Devil into knowing the savage real world and the wild people who populate it, choosing beauty in the person of a beautiful girl, selling the soul he does not believe it exists in order to spend a night with her, and eventually revolting against the payment he signed for. A more human Faust than in most of the other versions we know.If this Faust was only a video art work I would have completely fell under its spell. It does have however a narrative dimension, and this is where I found the pace and the style unnecessarily complicated, and the usage of dialog too heavy to follow easily and to be a pleasant experience for the viewers. Acting on the other hand is exquisite - Johannes Zeiler is a Faust torn between the desire to conquer the universe by understanding its mechanics and the passion that burns up his human shell, Russian actor Anton Adasinsky is amazing as the ugly sub-human Moneylender who opens the door to Faust's meeting with the ugliness of the world, and the contrasting Isolda Dychauk as a young botticellian Margarete who descends directly from Vermeer's paintings. This is one of these movies where the attention is drawn at any moment by visuals, and when it ends you tell yourself that you must have missed many of the hidden and deeper ideas. This may be true, but not completely, as Sokurov seems to be one of those directors who love to keep some of the details explained for himself only, assuming that he knows them at all.

Faust has quite rightly fallen under everyone's radar. I had never heard of it, until I saw it in a list someone made. It looked interesting, and then I read that it made one of my all time favourite directors, Darren Aronofsky cry. He has also infamously stated that Faust is the kind of film that has the power to change your life, or something along those lines. I then watched the trailer and it looked intense, powerful and not too much unlike Darren's own operatic masterpiece, Black Swan, which happens to be possibly my favourite film of all time. Thus of course I was sold. I bought the film on blu ray for £6.26 and was extremely excited to give it a watch. I went into Faust very open-minded. More than open-minded because I was honestly looking forward to it, I was expecting a beautifully intense and dream-like film, but unfortunately that is not what I received.The highest point in Faust is the brilliant opening shot which gracefully glides through the sky, where a mirror is bizarrely floating. We then pass underneath the clouds to reveal some awesome mountains and a village. It's a brilliant shot, reminiscent of Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge! We then get a nice close-up of a dead man's penis and some grisly depictions of an autopsy. It's here that the film slowly goes downhill, or rather curiously meanders down a dull path which should hopefully cure anyone of insomnia. A lot of reviewers seem concerned that the film is not a direct re-telling of the Faust legend. Unluckily for me, I have never read or seen anything to do with Goethe's Faust, which is a shame because it may have helped me to understand what was going on, as I was sometimes lost.My first problem with the film is that it has been unnecessarily boxed up. By this I mean that the film has black bands either side of the screen, which makes it more difficult to appreciate one of it's biggest redeeming features, the visuals. I don't see the point in doing this, unless it's only on the UK blu ray version of the film, which by the way, is not blu ray quality! It's also very easy to get lost in the film, and not in a good David Lynch kind of way, but a tedious way. I watch a lot of subtitled films, because I have a passion for foreign cinema, but even I found it difficult to keep up with. Someone is always talking at quite a brisk pace, meaning that you've got to keep up with the subtitles, meaning that a lot of the visuals get lost. The dialogue is also quite boringly pretentious with talks about philosophy and the like.However, if you strip back the story of the film there really isn't too much to it. It's just about a man who befriends an old man (who I think is supposed to be the devil) and he randomly falls for a young bereaved woman, and decides to sign his soul away in order to spend a night with her. But for some reason the film has been ludicrously padded out to 2 hours 20 minutes (it feels longer). Much of the film just follows Faust as he plods around with the devil, who rambles on for non-stop about things I don't entirely understand. It's the walking equivalent to a road movie, only nothing very interesting happens. I found much of it very boring, but I stuck with it.Faust isn't all bad though. It's at its most interesting when it's using surrealism to a bizarre and sometime unsettling effect. There's a monkey on the moon, an old man with a body like Danny De Vito in Batman Returns and a small person in a jar made from the liver of a donkey. Unfortunately these moments are few and far between. The film is much more interesting in lecturing the audience through boring characters who don't really develop or interest in any way. The film is also very often fantastic to look at. I loved how the film looked like it had all the colours drained from it and the locations were rich with period detail. The costumes were also lavish. The production values are actually quite excellent for an unknown German film. Unfortunately the screenplay isn't.Faust isn't the most boring film I've ever seen, but then again you're reading a review written by a poor chap who has sat through such cinematic stimulation as Import/Export and Uzak. Two of the most boring films on the planet. Faust doesn't come close to the level of boredom they caused, but if you've seen them then you'll know that that really isn't saying a lot. Faust is boring and has little plot or characters that capture your attention. It does have sporadic moments of creativity and surrealism, but there aren't enough of these moments to warrant it being watched. I think it's a film strictly for pseuds. Unfortunately I failed to find it intense, powerful or life changing. Ironically Faust is a film with no soul, or perhaps that's the point. I don't know. All I know is that I wasted £6.

At the very beginning of Faust, the camera plunges from the sky, descending to a small house in a rural town, and ends up zooming on the penis of a corpse dissected in an autopsy. In his retelling of one of the most famous tales of western literature, director Sokurov plays with symbols, juxtaposing spiritual and worldly, sacred and profane, water (associated with Margarete) and earth, sterility and fertility.See also how the film plays with space: indoor locations are overcrowded and claustrophobic, the town a labyrinth of mud and bricks, the uncanny forest surrounding it resembles Doré's illustrations for Dante's Comedy. Only when Margarete appears - and at the very end - sets become less oppressive. The result is an insidious, subtly disquieting movie.The occasional heavy-handed, distracting symbolism (the egg, the homunculus...) is redeemed by magnificent performances by the three leads. As Faust, Johannes Zeiler is exceptional in his vivid humanity, torn between sensuality and spirituality; as the object of his passion, lovely Isolda Dychauk gives a star-making turn. Anton Adasinsky as the "Moneylender" (the name Mephistopheles is never mentioned) is unctuous, porcine, whiny and malevolent, in a performance which defies all expectations for this kind of character and is all the more unsettling for that.8/10

Film review: Faust (Director: Alexander Sokurov)Be warned: Do not expect Goethe's Faust. While acknowledging the most famous adaptation of the Faust saga and using some lines from Goethe's text, this is entirely Alexander Sokurov's vision. The final instalment of a tetralogy about power (the other parts having featured Hitler, Lenin and Emperor Hirohito), Faust is far removed from the well-known drama about the knowledge-seeking explorer of ultimate truths we have come accustomed to associated with the name. The things this Faust, although a scientist, is looking for, are much more basic. At first he is little more than a hungry beggar trying to get food and money. Later he craves for Margarethe whom he regards as little more than a desired sex partner. There is nothing Faustian about this Faust who believes neither in God nor a soul and has discarded knowledge along with the other two. When he disembowels a corpse in the opening scene, he no longer expects to find anything, he does it out of little more than boredom. And even if he did find something: He wouldn't really care. This is an aimless Faust - and because of it a restless one. He is constantly on the move, less concerned with where he is going than getting away from wherever he is. A driven wanderer, not a determined searcher, frantic, harassed, as if on the run. Sokurov's camera stays with him, mirroring his hectic movements and creating a rhythm very much its own. This not at all metaphysical search is conducted at an ever- increasing speed, threatening to swallow up the protagonist. It begins to slow down when he meets the usurer, a grossly disfigured man who is Sokurov's version of Mephisto. But as Faust is much reduced in grandeur so is the devil's agent, a miserly moneylender and pawnbroker, nothing more. As Faust meets the usurer, the frantic pace eases into something of a ghostly dance as Faust, properly fed, turns his desire on Margarethe. When he succeeds, all comes to a stop: Drenched in angelic light, there is a moment of complete arrest, time stands still, and we just see their faces in total forgetful bliss. But it can't last. And it doesn't.Repeatedly, lines from Goethe's drama are spoken but as the film advances more and more of Faust's words end up uttered - and often ironically altered - by the usurer. They sound hollow at best and are, at worst, exposed as nothing but beautiful nonsense. The meaning we seek - and believe to find - in Faust, it has long departed, if it ever existed. The soulless universe Faust proclaims - Sokurov gives it its face: This is an ugly world, inhabited by ugly or at least strange people - memorable: Hanna Schygulla as the usurer's "wife" - bizarre but unquestioned happenings and no good whatsoever. There is a pale, sometimes blinding light over this universe, shapes get distorted in what appears to be the world of a dream, a nightmare. Who is the dreamer? Faust, the "devil", we?All appearance of any sort of "reality" vanishes after Faust finally succeeds in his wooing of Margarethe. Faust finds himself and the usurer in a barren landscape remnant of Goethe's Faust 2, he meets the dead but there is nobody living. In a final act of childlike defiance he stones the usurer, however, he doesn't die. Faust doesn't need him anymore - they have long been one and the same. As Faust wanders off, he has become an unthinking pleasure seeker, the polar opposite of Goethe's explorer and man of action.Sokurov has created a visual and atmospheric universe very much his own. The images seem covered with a yellow-greenish patina, in their paleness they embody the lifelessness of those dream creatures, those walking dead. Distorted figures and shapes help propel the film more and more into a dream state, yet the world Sokurov conjures up - whether "real" or not - is fully consistent. At times it feels like being inside a Hieronymus Bosch painting, it is a dirty, ugly, primitive, dying world. There may be no other living director who is capable of creating such a distinct and thoroughly convincing vision.Yet this strength is also the weakness of his film. The deliberately placed shock moments, the total refusal to create any believable character, the strict adherence to a counter-reality totally removed from anything we know, helps close this universe hermetically. We may get a glimpse of it but it is like looking from the safe distance at something disgusting. So fascination is replaced by disgust, what first seems like a revelation becomes annoying, and in the end this whole story turns to a modestly shocking horror tale that leaves the viewer cold. What remains, his a visually stunning, almost revolutionary piece of film making that perfectly reflects its subject: it lacks a soul.http://stagescreen.wordpress.com