There
is no way of watching a major film festival winner like Andrei Sokurov’s Faust without having to overcome a set
of expectations that being such a highly praised flick would entail. To explain
in detail what having these expectations means I would like to spend a moment
to examine the circumstances of Faust
becoming the winner of last year’s edition of the Venice Film Festival.
Viennale’s rickety track record of selecting its winners is a prime example of
how the politics of a film festival and the judges’ bias towards certain
artists has a power to poison its supposedly fair selection process. The most
recent edition that brought a lot of negative publicity was the 2010 festival
when Quentin Tarantino famously showered his ex-girlfriend Sofia Coppola and
her Somewhere with the most important
statuettes. Tarantino’s misjudgement prompted the festival’s organisers to
introduce more scrutiny into selection process, which would disable the jury
from pulling a similar audacious stunt in the future.
The
controversy surrounding the 2010 edition inevitably affected the politics of
awarding the films a year later. Even without watching the film one can
definitely notice how Faust seems to
be a very reasonably safe choice. Aleksander Sokurov is quite a renowned artist
whose filmography spans almost 20 feature films, many of which were awarded at
a multitude of film festivals in the years past. The director’s lack of
affiliation with any of the jurors (Darren Aronofsky chaired the jury that
year) and his indubitable directorial skills assured that there would be no
disagreement in choosing his film as the winner in 2011. Yet the blatancy of it
being such safe, uncontroversial choice diminishes the festival’s status and
victimises Sokurov by making him the festival’s agent of propagating political
correctness. But before we discuss that point a bit further, let’s look at the
film itself.
The
story of Faust loosely follows
Goethe’s 19th century masterpiece of the same title. Doctor Faust
(Johannes Zeiler) is disappointed with life which has brought him nothing but misery.
In the book, the character is a God-fearing individual who cherishes knowledge
above the well-being of his soul. The Faust that we know from Sokurov’s film
already acquired all the knowledge a human can hope to obtain and learned that
there was no happiness to be found in science. Understanding how the world
works made him vulnerable and nihilistic. Faust then accidentally meets a local
moneylender named Mauritius (Anton Adasinsky) who represents the devil from
Goethe’s prose – Mephistopheles. Mauritius stops Faust from committing suicide
and takes him on a journey around the town. In a public laundry Faust notices a
beautiful young girl name Margarete (Isolda Dychauk) who charms him with her
laughter. A chain of events, all of which are masterfully manipulated by
Mauritius, lead the two men to the funeral of Margarete’s estranged brother
where Faust is given a chance to make further advances towards the girl. The
two make an instant connection but in order to fulfil his sexual desires Faust
is forced to sell his soul to the devil.
The
list of differences between Sokurov’s film and Goethe’s novel is too long to
consider the source material anything more than an inspiration. Goethe’s
character was an archetypically romantic, restless soul whose hunger for
knowledge of the world prompts him to resign from eternal bliss. Sokurov’s Faust is a cold
pragmatic who looks at life through the prism of science, believing only in the
certainty of material things. That attitude turns him into a nihilist who
thinks that life is both absurd and unfair, lacking any sense of meaning. He
follows the footsteps of Kafka’s K, who is unable to make any sense of the social
injustice. Just like K, Faust is passively led to his doom, constantly pushed
around by society, unable to avoid his disastrous fate.
Sokurov
obviously has a message to share through his reinvention of Faust. In one of
the scenes Faust visits another doctor who runs a very successful practice in
the town. The secret to his success is his sensibility to applying just the right
kind of treatment so desired by his patients. According to Sokurov, the
intellectual elite are in decline as their insight is undermined by the
outgrowing consumerist market. Faust’s expertise is unwanted and unnecessary as
it goes against the popular concepts. His blind certainty in science pushes him
to the extremes and compels him to deny God or any form of the supernatural.
Sokurov criticises him for that. He surrounds his main character with the
mystique of nature and presents him with the angelic countenance of Margarete,
but the man still cannot see below the surface. In the end his ignorance, as is
the case for so many characters, is his undoing.
Sokurov’s
theme of spirituality vs. science brings us back to the aforementioned point
about the festival’s political correctness. The director’s objection towards a consumerist
society is clichéd to say the least. Even more, the director makes some
astounding assumptions that people’s vain consumerism is the outcome of a
spiritual decline which will lead us to atheism and nihilism. His distrust in
science comes from a conviction that no scientific formula can describe
artistic sensibilities. The jury of the festival stands in full support of
Sokurov’s view, no matter how tiresome and over-prudent the perception of
spiritual superiority over science might be. But what matters for Viennale is
that Sokurov’s film is a poster child for cinema d’auteur. Through the film’s
audacious aesthetics, non-linear storytelling, and artistic inter-textuality
the festival board proves that they are still able to recognise ‘real’ cinema.
And that creates an interesting paradox – Viennale fulfils Sokurov’s prophecy
of artistic decline precisely by awarding his film with the main prize.
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