Faust movie review & film summary (2013)

Indeed, compared to many Sokurov films, this one has an enlivening paradoxicality: it's morbid but upbeat, grim yet rapturous. With its constant motion and elegant reframings, the camera gives the proceedings an almost balletic breathlessness, while painterly influences—chiefly Bosch and Brueghel—infuse the film's succession of ornate sets (suggesting 19th century Germany, though no epoch is specified) and anchor a muted but wondrously subtle palette of grays, greens and browns.

Sonically, the production is just as rich, with a densely layered soundscape sculpted around the near-constant accompaniment of Andrei Sigle's Gounod-influenced score.

Sokurov's main cast also enhances his enterprise. Although this Faust has little of the metaphysical reach of Goethe's (per the suggestion of Russian critics, he's far more post-Soviet than German Romantic), Johannes Zeiler's strong performance offers a muscular vision of a man pursuing his own damnation as deliberately as any Charles Bukowski protagonist. His great antagonist, a moneylender named Mauricius, is far more phlegmatic and pragmatic than Goethe's witty Mephistopheles, as well as grotesquely bizarre when seen nude, yet the character works due to the punk-rock intensity of actor Anton Adasinskiy. And Isolda Dychauk, a Botticellian beauty, is undeniably credible as the woman for whom Faust willingly signs away his soul.

The supporting cast, meanwhile, notably contains Hanna Schygulla as Mauricius' wife, an ancient and strangely attired matron, and the actress' presence inevitably suggests links between Sokurov and certain New German Cinema predecessors. The Russian director's dazzling camera choreography does, in fact, recall not only F.W. Murnau's 1926 "Faust" but also later masterworks such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "Berlin Alexanderplatz," while its meticulously realized settings bring to mind Werner Herzog's "Kaspar Hauser."