Faust

Much-feted Russian director Alexander Sokurov's rendering of the Faust legend takes a lot of liberty with the original story while serving up plenty of visual elegance. Here, Faust (Johannes Zeiler) is portrayed as an unsuccessful medical doctor in rural 19th-century Prussia, a decaying, claustrophobic, pre-Enlightenment milieu full of human viscera, where the sickly specter of death always hangs heavy in the air. The Mephistopheles character is an old man called “the moneylender” (Anton Adasinsky), who promises Faust the girl of his dreams—town beauty Margarete (Isolda Dychauk)—if he will sign away his soul. The lonely, lovesick Faust agrees, thus assuring his own agonizing descent into a dark dreamlike underworld. Sokurov's handling of the brief relationship between Faust and Marguerite is unnecessarily and obnoxiously risqué, while his vision of Hell is more ambiguous than previous adaptations. Faust seems to begin in a terrestrial Hell-on-Earth, only to be led to a half-real, half-dream-like place where Hell is more a state of mind than a tortuous physical environment. While the all-important philosophical questions at the heart of Goethe's tale seem to get buried under the style, this decidedly artistic take will be appreciated by fans of the director. Recommended. (M. Sandlin)