Sokurov: Faust (2011)

Sometimes the best way to interpret a classic is to make it totally unrecognisable, and without a few key references scattered throughout the script, it wouldn’t necessarily be clear that Aleksandr Sokurov’s latest film is his take on Faust. Although it nominally follows the more familiar narrative of Faust, Mephistopheles and Gretchen, it’s largely freeform and ambient, as Mephistopheles leads Faust through one depraved tableau after another, in what appears to be early nineteenth-century Germany. In tone and spirit, then, it’s more an adaptation of the second part of Goethe’s Faust than any other canonical version – although adaptation isn’t quite the word, since it feels more like Sokurov has used Goethe as a precedent for seeing just how far he can bend and extend the legend while remaining true to its basic co-ordinates. Like the second part of Goethe’s Faust, too, it recapitulates more than elaborates the main narrative of temptation and decline, devoting most of its energy to the perceptual aftermath of Faust’s bargain with Mephistopheles for his soul. Most immediately, that makes it about Faust fully apprehending the existence of the soul, which Sokurov takes as a pretext for exquisitely modulated horror – if the soul truly exists, the film seems to suggest, then there’s something indescribably more grotesque about the body than Faust ever realised, and it’s that grotesquerie that the film sets out to capture. Initially, that involves a recourse to historical-surgical horror, procedures that blur the bounds between torture and treatment, but even that fades in comparison to Sokurov’s striking combination of lenses and filters, which makes it feel as if everything’s taking place at the edge of a faded, mouldy, convex mirror. Among other things, that produces quite odd body language and blocking – as in a convex mirror, the characters are continually rubbing up against other in slippery, vertiginous ways, while every encounter has something conspiratorial, Mephistophelean about it, diffusing the real Mephistopheles into a slippery, ambient venue for the soul's coming and goings. Individual movements – and the movements of the camera itself – also become indistinguishable, until there’s something positively apocalyptic about the way everyone and everything’s on the verge of collapsing into the ring of dull, mildewy light at the edge of the mirror. In a kind of metaphysics of horror, then, it becomes more noumenal even as it becomes more grotesque, more ethereal as it feels more embodied: the closest distance between two points may be a curved line, but that just makes you feel the full convexity of the eyeball. And so the power of Sokurov's vision is not merely that he evokes the soul, but that he evokes the soul's permeability with the body, lingering at the circuitous cusp between poetry and physicality, this world and the next.