The Faust legend has been filmed many times, in many ways. The distinguished Russian director Alexander Sokurov’s (“Russian Ark”) may be the most unusual; it’s also the most arid.
Our antihero (Johannes Zeiler) is once again a doctor, introduced as he lifts the intestines out of a dissected corpse. But this Faust has no apparent thirst for knowledge, no vision of himself soaring above common men. No, he’s just a penniless loser, who spends the movie wandering in and out of a single dismal town with the Moneylender (Anton Adasinskiy), a dumpy, querulous version of Mephistopheles. All Faust wants is to sleep with Margarete (Isolda Dychauk); he doesn’t even sign away his soul until the movie’s almost closing in on the two-hour mark.
Sokurov deploys some amazingly agile camera movements, and builds his action out to every corner of the frame. But it’s still rendered hideous by a palette that bleaches everything to a urine-ish yellow or a corpselike gray, and “Faust” is also ceaselessly talky. Much of the dialogue is scatological humor that’s leadenly unfunny, like a professor reading out loud from “Tristam Shandy.” With so little of the supernatural, this “Faust” is left to explore human grossness, and there’s little mystery or terror in that.