”Faust” and the viewer who is not afraid, but he is afraid
The plot of the classic German poem about the Doctor and Devil , rewritten by Yuri Arabov, became the finale (or the beginning - whoever you like) of Alexander Sokurov's tetralogy about power. "Moloch" (Adolf Hitler), "Taurus" (Vladimir Lenin), "Sun" (Emperor Hirohito ) and "Faust" compositionally form a very long and not quite clear , at first glance, a story about how and why the mechanics of power works in general, what a person who reaches the top is like, and what this top is like.Three short stories - as it turned out, there is power. Icy loneliness, of course. Even the surgeon Faust (Johannes Zeiler), who has neither power, nor money, nor sense, wanders around the conditional German city of the nineteenth century (surreal shooting, on the verge of light madness - cameraman Bruno Delbonel), dogs carnivorous Usurer (Anton Adasinsky), looks at the beautiful Margarita (Isolde Dyushauk) and remains completely alone.  Death, where can we go without it. Faust himself, looking for a soul in a disassembled corpse, is a dead grain, from which, according to the biblical parable, a living tree grows, and "Faust" (that is, a film) is the starting point of Sokurov's thoughts about that all his heroes - Hitler, Lenin, and Hirohito - must be dead beforehand. The living do not rule at all, the living live, and Faust still lives. For more than two hours he is approaching death, and this, by the way, is a very exciting sight, if you understand exactly where the main character is moving, and most importantly - why. To die to take everything from life, as Kurt Cobain would say.The absence of any boundaries and frames, finally. "Faust" tells not about the sale of the soul to the Moneylender (which is like Mephistopheles, but not quite, not completely: a demon afraid of himself), but about the fact that if it will be necessary for a seeking and restless person, the devil himself will sell his soul, and even pay extra. There is no reception against a scrap, no demon can resist against a person, because only a person can despise all boundaries. Faust takes the soul out of the Usurer, it is he, Johannes Zeiler, who plays a petty demon, from which real power grows, and Anton Adasinsky is forced to pretend to be the force of evil. He's not strong at all.  Now imagine that "Faust" still goes on not only at festivals ( The Golden Lion Venice is not a joke) and not only in small cinemas, where specially trained people wander, but also big screens in huge cinemas of giant shopping centers, where bored townspeople come on Saturday. Alexander Sokurov was afraid that the fate of his film would not work out in USA, but the distributors, as if mocking the director, gave Faustprime time.Even if not for long.  As a result, tiny viewers from giant shopping malls came out in the middle of the movie, barely holding back the horror that rushes out (it is masked by a vulgar phrase“boring!”,but the price of such confessions is known) and this is the director's main achievement, no fools. A modern person, hung with gadgets and accustomed to seeing "Pirates of the Caribbean" raging on screens or "Sex and the City" sobbing, can really be afraid of only one. And Sokurov, telling his - seemingly completely different - story, here falls into the very nerve, in the most painful place. He's not scary, but still very scary.We are afraid of the recognition that we are not the most important here, that we are not the center of the world, not the crown of evolution, not the triumph of reason and not the subtlety of feelings. Just a pile of bones and meat, who knows how to open their mouth for some reason and move in an unknown direction. We are alive, but are we alive, and is life what we consider life? Wouldn't it be better to die like Faust, to be reborn as something different, more perfect, than to keep inventing activities, hobbies, interests, love and sincerity that still only mask our fear of death and loneliness ? "Faust" is scary, like a scary mirror, in which nothing is yet reflected except the dim room behind. And some features are about to show through. I'm not sure everyone will like them ... The Topic of Article: ”Faust” and the viewer who is not afraid, but he is afraid. |
