Critics reviews

Two weeks removed from this screening and its majestic oddness still eludes me. If Taurus is Sokurov's most straightforward film,Faust is at the opposite end of the spectrum, a slippery concoction whose visuals – alternating between show-stopping moments of clarity traceable to iconic European paintings and inebriated, claustrophobic trudges in soft-focus through damp, dark interiors – seem beamed from another world.

FAUST, perhaps all at once [Sokurov's] most Tarkovskian feature and the one that works hardest to undermine his master's work, Sokurov's powers are at their height. FAUST, perhaps all at once his most Tarkovskian feature and the one that works hardest to undermine his master's work, Sokurov's powers are at their height.

Faust is an infinitely complex film toward a search to the failure of human nature's desire for knowledge that does not define great men, but all of us. "Good does not exist, but evil does," a character warns the Herr Doktor. Such trifles toward the search to comprehending the heavens within the language below it can only lead us to our useless search through the desert. Knowledge is nothing without the faith to believe it.

So much of Sokurov's film is strange to the point of vexation, but this finale ends it on a moment of clarity even as it leaves a future shrouded in mystery. Certainly, no film since Herzog's Nosferatu remake has managed to mix the impasse of nature with the emergence of a monster to such poetic, lilting effect.

Sokurov deploys some amazingly agile camera movements, and builds his action out to every corner of the frame. But it's still rendered hideous by a palette that bleaches everything to a urine-ish yellow or a corpselike gray, and "Faust" is also ceaselessly talky. Much of the dialogue is scatological humor that's leadenly unfunny, like a professor reading out loud from "Tristam Shandy.

Goethe's Faust is epic; Sokurov's has a distinctly human scale, yet he flattens the tale's meaning, which is not helped with an unwieldy conclusion: Faust is released from Mauritius's grip, as he realizes that he is beholden neither to the living nor the dead. It's an exuberant ending that is nevertheless tempered if we consider this film in relation to the earlier entries in the Tetralogy.

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.

As its closing credits indicate, Faust is intended as an epilogue to a trilogy of films Sokurov released around the turn of the century... which dealt with 20th-century political figures who were either losing power or had already lost it. Faust is more complex than these earlier films. It manages to convey a desire for power in abstract terms, divorced from material gain or a need to be admired. What's more, it manages to do it with energy and a good deal of weird humor.

This is a circumscribed world of thwarted souls and dim prospects. Gradually, though, in the Devil's company, we (and Faust) begin to discover the mysterious beauty of the human environment and the grandeur of nature. The movie expands in its frame, surpassing simple comprehension and continuing to grow in your mind — and perhaps to blow it — long after it's over.

Torpedoing even easy narrative conclusions every step of the way, as he's done since 1997's Mother and Son, the filmmaker seems here to be instead mustering a stormy human tribulation and then letting the thematic fungi grow as they will... Faust is not your great-granddaddy's selling-your-soul fable, but something new, a dreamy immersion into the messiness of myth, where hubris and desire can get lost in the chaos of time and retelling.

Despite the classical context of Goethe and Thomas Mann, the flow feels especially Russian—long conversational walks, distant forest noises, weird explosions of pissiness. Often, Faust plays like a lost cousin to Andrei Tarkovsky's haunted Stalker (1979), catnip for the slow-and-low crowd. Settle in, because this requires your charity, but you'll dream it all back up the next night.

The soundtrack, in addition to the classically based score, is filled with the babble of the villagers' hurly-burly. But Sokurov seems to overextend this busyness with inscrutable choices like slanting seemingly random shots diagonally with distorting lenses throughout. And when Faust and his beloved fall into a lake together a la L'Atalante, it's a jarring homage in a work that's miles from Jean Vigo's style and sensibility.