Faust (by Sokurov)

I wanted to watch this movie for a long time, and finally I felt that I was ready to do that.
I decided to watch it with russian subtitles so that I was able to hear the genuine german speech.
When I asked other people what their opinion on the film was, they all agreed on one thing, that they wanted to review it. And I got the same feeling.

The interesting thing is that usually this desire occurs after the film has finished or even later on, after some analysis. And this time the idea to watch the film once more arose while I was watching it for the first time. I wished to stop playback sometimes and to re-watch particular scenes in order to understand what the director had tried to carry down to the audience. And this feeling had nothing to do with solving puzzles in movies by Jarmusch, Kaurismäki, etc. It was something I couldn't understand or explain or even name.
It seems to me that the movie is rather grave. Time passes quickly when you watch it, but it leaves behind an unpleasant feeling. I had a constant distaste for what I saw on the screen, though I understood this attitude was based on the text and the idea of the story. It must be great that Sokurov succeeded in filling the viewer with such perception of the on-screen world, but this thought doesn't lessen the distaste at all.
Sokurov spent many years in search of proper actors and shooting locations, and he made the right choice, I suppose. He wanted the image to look like medieval or Northern Renaissance works of art, and it really does look so. But to see how the characters of such a painting begin to move and interact is an eerie spectacle. What's going on seems to be unspeakably unnatural. There aren't many fabulous events, but everything seems to be turned inside out. I couldn't help feeling artificiality of the characters' actions while watching the film.
The image itself looks like it was kept to mature, as the tea Puer is kept buried in the ground. You can almost feel the light rotten scent of decay and vanity of vanities. There's an interesting method of plane distortion of the image, but unfortunately I wasn't able to figure out the regularity in its application.
Many times my eye stumbled over the cut, which is odd. Despite the allusion to the paintings, that are static by their nature, Sokurov seems to hasten to tell us the whole story, saving precious seconds on the mise-en-scènes left without people. I felt the lack of these seconds between the scenes strongly, 'cause it's they that let the viewer take delight in the beauty of the shot, they let us feel the aftertaste of an episode and comprehend its meaning. Even when Faust and Margaret fell in water, I still lacked kind of an instant all the same.
The movie was strange not only to watch, but to listen to as well. It's poor in music, and that is what I like, but the noises filling the atmosphere sometimes became a bit annoying. It intensifies the feeling of vanity of vanities, though, so I don't think of it as of a disadvantage. But the most complicated part was the perception of speech. It can partly be explained by watching the film with subtitles, but that's just one side of the problem. The main reason, in my opinion, is that I didn't hear the distinction between the significant and insignificant cues. At times two important conversations can alternate with each other, so that you have to make additional efforts to hold the thread of each dialogue. At times extraneous cues, suitable for the background, sound clearer and louder than the main character's speech. Voices are heard from everywhere, merging into meaningless hum, and you have to be tense all the time to separate husk from the grain.
On the one hand, it's an interesting and partly reasonable method. It can be considered as an attempt to put the viewer in the position of a random observer in an unfavorable situation. This is pretty close to what we really hear, for the differentiation between significant and unsignificant information is a task for our brain, not our ears. But separation of different signals while listening to the record is complicated, so I wouldn't say it's a good method. I was in permanent tension, not because of the plot, but due to the difficulty of comprehension.
Summing up, I would say that it's hard to estimate the movie distinctly. It's undoubtedly interesting to watch the film. But I think I failed to fully understand it, and I realised it almost as soon as I began to watch it. The reason may be that I'm not acquainted with Socurov's works very well, and he has his own cinematographic language, a set of symbols that you can't read watching a single movie. But the other reason may be that Socurov isn't a sort of director I could ever fully understand and appreciate.