“There are films which change your life forever. This is one of those films.” - Darren Aronofsky
With a daring and justice that should be recorded in Venetian history, the jury of the 68th Mostra del Cinema gave the Golden Lion to Aleksandr Sokurov’s Faust. The story of a medieval doctor crossing the threshold between good and evil comes to life in a Russian-directed, German-speaking masterpiece.
We see, hear and almost smell the Middle Ages. We are transported, bumpily but thrillingly, through comedy, tragedy, romance, fable. We are teased with caricature – including a Mephistopheles of grotesque shape and swaggering menace, brilliantly played by Anton Adasinsky – and awed by beauty, from Isolda Dychauk’s Margarete to cliffs and forests out of Caspar David Friedrich. In the last reel, Sokurov all but blows our socks off. The film goes onward and upward to a conclusion that seems to be not of this world, nor of any we have foreseen or imagined.
Goethe’s original is sometimes barely recognisable. The poet-playwright’s text has mutated into a vision. Sokurov, for years a byword for eccentric minimalism (Whispering Pages, Moloch) alternating with flashes of quixotic virtuosity (Russian Ark), has made a film complete, magical and accessible to all. - Nigel Andrews, The Financial Times