Translated material
Rostostrik Mephistopheles
Shot from the film "Faust". Mephistopheles - Anton Adasinsky (left), Faust - Johannes Zayler
Mont Blanc over the Alps. The award of the “Golden Leo” film “Faust” by Alexander Sokurov at the 68th Film Festival in Venice is of fundamental importance for Sokurov, and for Russian cinema, and for the Venetian festival
Faust, with all the complexity of its composition and aesthetics, was adequately, respectfully and enthusiastically perceive the press, and criticism, and the public of the Venetian festival. Against the backdrop of a completely representative program, interesting films and large names, the film towered like a Montblania over the Alps. Sokurov’s victory is perceived even by those who are not among his fans, as inevitability, as a logical completion of a long dramatic plot, which was played between an outstanding director and festivals.
Missing soul
“One of the best festivals of recent years ended in the best distribution of bonuses ... Faust Sokurov ... as a sip of fresh air - more precisely, stench, because the director shows the bodies that were torn by Dr. Faust, immersing us in the Middle Ages, so bodily that it can be smell,” wrote the Messajoro newspaper.
It's about the shocking beginning of the film, as if sketched from the works of the artist Jacob de Gain, where they gut the corpses, fry the humanity and suck blood out of people. Similar to this happens in the "creative laboratory" of Faust even before the devil of his own person is. The motive for disgraces is the thirst for knowledge, the desire to declassify the divine riddle of life, an insatiable craving for experiment - whether in science, art or politics. The daring of the rational atheistic spirit, the deification of individual will and the authorities lead to the most radical concept of the superman, to the removal of homunculus in the form of separate specimens and entire peoples, to manipulation of huge masses, to the triumph of new barbarism.
In the classic version of the Enlightenment, these motives are personified by Dr. Faust, in the modernist German - Dr. Faustus Thomas Mann, in the modernist Russian - Lenin, the hero of the Sokurovsky “Taurus”. Faust summarizes this historical conflict, returning us from real characters to the space of a literary myth, but at the same time giving it frightening authenticity and at the same time radically changing its meaning.
The first sensation from the film is the stench of European civilization, not yet equipped with the discoveries of hygiene technologies. But this is the stench of the human body, deprived of the soul: after all, Faust and its assistants during the autopsy are not able to detect the desired substance - the soul, instead of it - intestines, organs of respiratory, sexual and digestive, nothing more. And the body without a soul exudes not the most pleasant aroma.
Following the soul, Faust inspects another most important concept of human culture: the word that was supposedly at the beginning. Sokurov “Faust” is not a film adaptation, but “reading between the lines”, and reading German in his native Goethe. The script of Yuri Arabov includes an array of witty, honed dialogues pouring from the screen like a mountain waterfall, causing laughter and fear, sometimes a shudder. Arabov is also attributed to the introduction of Gogol characters in the structure of the plot - Chichikov and the servant who rushed to Paris in Paris, put Fausta with Mephistopheles to themselves, and then throw it on the side of the road: this, you see, the fate of the Western ideas in Russia. However, Sokurov denies a direct connection with the "dead souls".
Be that as it may, neither a word nor the concept, they score a powerful visual texture of the film, which demanded a solid budget and attracting the operator levels Bruno Delbonnel, who shot Amelie and Harry Potter. He, along with the director, created magnificent screen landscapes and portraits, stylistic samples for which German romantics (his beloved Caspar David Frederick), as well as Krana and Rembrandt became. For the first time in his practice, Sokurov used special effects in the almost Hollywood sense, but with a completely opposite goal - in order not to catch up, but, on the contrary, to disperse pathos, not to dumb the viewer with a blow to the brain, but to force them to strain.
The element of real evil
Sokurov’s distance from Hollywood emphasizes not only the German language. This is also indicated by the absence of international stars: the only exception is Hannanah Shigulla, who was starving as the wife of Mephistophel. It is also no coincidence that Mephistopheles in the picture, strictly speaking, is not: this antisanitarian type is simply called a trap, it is deprived of any infernality, not the hellish flame, but the stench, leaves the gastrointestinal disorders from its likely body-it is depicts of Anton Adasinsky, an actor with magnificent plasticity, prompting to recall it. Giants of silent cinema.
Sokurov has always emphasized the advantages of literature over the cinema. He is now true to himself, but at the same time, the movie remains his secret (no longer for many) love. He amazingly, with genuine inspiration, shoots the finale of the film, which is played out in the metaphorical hell, among Icelandic volcanic rocks and geysers. This is a clear roll call with the cinema of German expressionism and the aesthetics of Arnold Funk mountain films, which were so loved by the Nazis. 
At one time, the Sokurovsky “Moloch” was performed in this aesthetics, which began “Tetralogy of Power”. Today we see her prelude and at the same time a brilliant conclusion - the denouement of that historical, religious and cultural plot, which was tied to Faust and which in the 20th century was never brought to a logical end.
Sokurov’s film is characterized by murderous irony: it is clearly akin to a romantic era, only this irony is darker and tougher. Margarita in the version of Sokurov is not a victim of a cynical conspiracy, but his voluntary participant, and it is difficult to say whether Faust or her seduce her. As for the most famous conspiracy, fastened with blood, and here history makes adjustments, which Goethe could hardly have guessed. In the constant and even postmodern world, where the lack of soul has been scientifically proven, Faust has nothing to sell, and it can easily do without the operetic messengers of hell, being more and more immersed in the element of real evil. Faust, a fairly strong baby performed by Johannes Zayler, despising the terms of the transaction, throws the mountain boulders of a miserable Mephistopheles with mountain boulders, except perhaps for the role of a pivot. And already independently, not in need of temptations or reflection, it runs “further, further, further” along the path that is clearly visible in the landscape of the 21st century, where there are no more illusions and there are no evil gods: there are only its real performers.