SOKUROV'S NEW TAKE ON 'FAUST'

                                   

I AM immediately drawn to the name ‘Sokurov’ as I glance over the Melbourne International Film Festival guide in The Age. It all began at an earlier MIFF occasion- ‘Mother and Son’- going by, admittedly, a heartfelt recommendation by Nick Cave that was originally published in ‘The Independent on Sunday’:

 

'A FRIEND of mine invited me to attend an advance screen of a Russian film in Soho. I asked him what it was like and he said, "Well, nothing really happens and then someone dies. Come along. You'll love it." My friend was releasing the film in this country, so I felt obliged. Sitting through a Russian film is the kind of thing friends do for each other.

I arrived late and made my way to the front row just as the opening credits were ending. Ten minutes in, I started quietly crying and continued to do so for the 73-minute duration of the film. Now, I've cried in films before but I can't remember crying quite so hard, without pause, all the way through. When the film ended and the lights came on, a red-eyed woman sitting behind me pushed a Kleenex in my direction and asked me if I would write something about it for one of the newspapers.

The film is called Mother and Son, and is directed by Aleksandr Sokurov. It explores the final day in the life of a dying mother (Gudrun Geyer) and her adult son (Alexei Anaishnov). It is morning. The mother wants the son to take her for a "walk", which involves carrying her through a series of dreamlike landscapes, whereupon he returns to their bare, isolated home, feeds her, and puts her to bed. The son then leaves the house to walk on his own and returns to find that she has died. All this takes 76 minutes. But what we witness in that time is a thing of such beauty, such sadness, that to cry, for me, was the only adequate response.It was a profound experience.'





 Such a simple story of a love a son has for his dying mother. He carries her across stunning landscapes that are filmed with some sort of a distorted – known as anamorphic- lens, inspired by the craftsmanship of Caspar David Friedrich. She is lovingly cradled in his arms like the Pieta, and their image appears at the bottom of the screen, at the bottom of a path that reaches upwards along a kind of valley. It takes some time for the distant figures to reach the top of the screen, hence the top of the mountain. It reminds me of Van Gogh’s appreciation of the Christina Rossetti poem:

‘Does the road go uphill all the way?’

‘Yes, to the very end.’

‘And does the journey take all day?’

‘From morn to night, my friend.’

Thankfully, Sokurov has all the patience in the world as we celebrate the moving and beautiful portrait of this son’s love for his mother. There is very little need for dialogue. Dialogue would spoil the mood. There are insects, however, and the final inevitable release. The emotions for the mother are palpable.  It is no less tense, but far less complex, than Paul Morel’s love for Gertrude Morel in Lawrence’s ‘Sons and Lovers.’ Like Gertrude Morel, this Russian man’s mother dies too, but much more quietly and peacefully, accepting the inevitability of death. Her son has taken his mother on her final journey, so there must be a sense of relief for him, too.

Another MIFF brought us “The Sun’, about Emperor Hirohito, and the enormous sense of expectation on his shoulders as Japan’s role in the Second World War becomes increasingly complex and the war is ending. Hirohito is in a bunker underneath Tokyo. He is fascinated with marine life and in an extraordinary sequence marvels over a specimen crab. Equally interesting is his vision of flying fish as airplanes in the sky.  It is a very personal piece which examines Hirohito’s conscience and portrays him as a man who, although at odds temperamentally with General Macarthur, also in the film, is able to share dinner and a cigar with him. Hirohito seems timid and child-like, against the brash American. The American press corps take delight in photographing this strange, elusive man, which is the funniest moment in the film.

 

  

I saw ‘Russian Ark’ at the old Lumiere cinema in Exhibition Street. A stunning technical achievement, the camera and the film’s narrators wander through a multitude of rooms inside the Winter Place, recreating a tapestry of historical events, all done without any digital editing, in a single sequence. The scene in which the ghostly figure of the eccentric narrator pauses in front of Rembrandt’s ‘Return of the Prodigal Son’ is a personal favourite. Each room seems to represent a different historical period, including the time of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and the frightening world of Josef Stalin. The location is beautiful, as are the costumes and paintings. A long sequence of an orchestra being filmed is slow and seductive, and the large number of inhabitants inside the Winter Palace, drift out the exit and into the cold air during the closure of the film.

 

 

‘Father and Son’ was played as a one off at the Nova in Carlton, as part of a Russian Film Festival called, I think, ‘Russian Resurrection.’  The beauty and honesty and tenderness of a parent and a sibling is quite different here. I would love to see the film again. I remember a lot of shots on a rooftop somewhere in Russia, and some stained glass. Like some of his other films, there isn’t a lot of action. It is mostly meditative. The experience was almost as equally moving as the tenderness in ‘Mother and Son.’ This time it is like the touch between father and son in Rembrandt’s ‘The Return of the Prodigal Son’, except there is a homo-erotic element which I find fascinating. Their embraces are vigorous and warm and sometimes vaguely sexual.

 

      

‘Which takes me to ‘Faust’, which is based on Goethe’s version, not the Marlowe that I taught at Newent Community College in Gloucestershire, which is the one I am familiar with. The film went for over two hours, but it went by very quickly, and tired as I was, I concentrated on every frame, marvelling at the lighting, the depiction of a previous time, the ancient villages and rugged landscapes. Faust is impoverished and unfulfilled and desperate to know the secrets of the soul. He meets a bizarre Mephistopholean figure, who has a body that is more bestial than human, with a penis attached from behind rather than at front. Faust makes his pact, written in his blood, and finds himself unwittingly wearing armour in the loneliest and most desolate landscape imaginable. This, it seems, is his Hell- there is no way out and no food or water, not exactly the gates of Hell opening, as in the Marlowe, but devastating for him nevertheless.  I was hoping to see that horrific, doomed,  fiery opening. Faust gets his woman, the Gretchen, in this film called Margarete. She is pale and innocent looking, porcelain and quite beautiful, and rural looking. Faust is obviously desperate for his moment in time with her. When it comes it is surprisingly understated, rather than being lustful or overtly sexual. Faust does pore over her naked body but it is sensitively done. Sokurov uses the most intense close-ups I have ever seen, and her pale face and reddish hair lights up the screen in this incredible yellow glow. All else is dark. The heads of other members of the audience are lit up as well. Sokurov revisits the anamorphic lens, reminiscent of ‘Mother and Son’ again, but this time inconsistently, as if he wants to try it for a certain effect in some shots only. I read somewhere that the painterly influence is someone other than Casper David Friedrich this time- someone I don’t know called David Teniers, a Flemish painter, and a landscape painter from the same period known as Herri met de Bles. It is the latter that is the more obvious-  I have looked at these pictures and I can see the striking resemblance.

 

                                

 

 

The influence of a painter on a director and cinematographer is a fantastic thing. Ingmar Bergman admired Edvard Munch. I might be wrong, but I thought I could see Munch’s influence when I saw Bergman’s ‘Cries and Whispers.’ It is the stilted figures, the sisters, like in the sad, raw Munch pictures that show his grieving family.

 

                             

The vision of Hell in Sokurov’s ‘Faust’ reminds me a lot of the vision Shakespeare created for the musing Claudio, facing execution,  in ‘Measure For Measure:

‘‘…to bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world.’    


  

 

 

 

 

A SHORT FILM ABOUT LOVE: not just a study in voyeurism

A LONELY young man living somewhere in urban Poland lives in a crowded tenement apartment block and becomes fixated on a woman of around 30-35 who lives in a similar sized apartment opposite. Like James Stewart in ‘Rear Window’, he finds the goings on in the apartment interesting and becomes obsessed, watching with a well -trained pair of binoculars. The woman occasionally takes a lover, other times going to the fridge or unwinding from a busy day, often in underwear, oblivious to the hungry male eyes peering at her.

 

                               

 

Krzysztof Kieslowski is an imaginative and daring film director, somewhat in the style of Michael Haneke, in that his audience is often made to feel unsettled. Each time I see one of his films I know I am in for an engaging and truthful ride about ordinary people who somehow find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. ‘A Short Film About Death’ was about an unhinged young man, who seemed to be like many troubled people you might find anywhere on the streets, who happens to unexpectedly murder a taxi driver in bloody and gruesome circumstances. The murder is compelling in its unexpectedness and the taxi driver is totally vulnerable and unsuspecting. It is the manner of the killing that is compelling. He takes a long time to die, after prolonged attempts at strangulation, only to find that he is finally bludgeoned by a rock. Even the killer seems to be grimacing by this point. Like Macbeth, he goes so far, and there seems to be no turning back. Both ‘Death’ and ‘Love’ are part of a long series of films based on the 10 commandments under the title ‘Decalogue.’

 ‘A Short Film About Love’, begins with the young man named Tomek  breaking into what looks like some sort of laboratory, stealing a telescope, intercut with scenes of the young woman in her flat playing cards and pacing about with a paintbrush in a state of undress. When he gets home he begins what will become a nightly ritual of preying on her with his hungry eyes. Of course the film won’t be much unless, like ‘Rear Window’, the subject is interesting and complex in some way. The young woman doesn’t let him down.

 

                 

To add intrigue to the personality of the young voyeur, we get glimpses of the  lonely home life he shares with his doting grandmother. She ironically asks him to watch ‘Miss Poland’ on the TV, an innocent form of voyeurism, very different to his own version of Miss Poland across the way.

There are phone calls, ones he makes to her, as if the dispassionate distant view of her isn’t enough and he needs to hear her voice. Then he makes the discovery that she has a lover and the sexual embrace turns him away momentarily from the telescope, just when we thought this might ramp up his attention. So, it seems, he is curiously emotionally involved. Another lover.  The same response. This time, in one of the few  comic moments in the film, he picks up the phone when he sees the embrace and rings the gas company about an imaginary leak, in her apartment. He is going to do his best to interrupt things. The gas man’s voice on the phone says ‘don’t light anything.’ When he hangs up he immediately lights a cigarette. The gas men come around, superfluously of course, and it works a treat. The love making is disrupted, the mood broken. Tomek laughs devilishly, and in a sudden burst of anger punches a hole in his wardrobe door. It is unsettling and is the first sign of potential derangement.

There is the expected anger and disbelief when Tomek catches up with the woman in the street and tells her he watches her through her window. Later, when the woman challenges Tomek over the reasons he watches her, he tells her in candid fashion it is because he loves her. When she asks him if he wants to kiss her, sleep with her, her experience enters a new realm. She is an object of brutal desire for men, but Tomek is more complicated. He is simply different. He has an emotional need for her that her playboys don’t have. And she finds it fascinating, and appealing.

When Tomek does summon the courage to see her again, he appeals to her in traditional fashion by knocking at her door and asking her for a date for ice cream!  The date organised, Tomek whirls around in circles dragging his milk crate. Kieslowski is presenting Tomek as a child, emotionally stunted. He craves attention and affection and is spectacularly inexperienced. These two are a very unusual match. In a beautifully realised scene, played simply and almost without music, the woman can see two lovers behind her in the café, the male lovingly caressing the female’s hands. She wants this too. She establishes that Tomek has taken her mail, has watched her for a year, and has sent her false money orders via his job at the post office- basically acknowledges in an understated way that this is ‘harassment’:  and yet she wants him to caress her hands.

At her apartment Tomek can see where she lives for the first time without a telescopic lens. Her tenderness and close proximity are unbearable for him, and in a scene vaguely reminiscent of Ian McEwan’s ‘On Chesil Beach’, Tomek  suddenly runs home, humiliated.

Shifts occur. She turns casual lovers away. She has real feelings for another man. And she briefly turns into voyeur as she tries to tenderly watch over Tomek as she fears for his mental health. As a basin of water turns red with blood, we remember that Tomek has been associated with blood before, blood-red as in violence. Her colour has been white, as in spilt milk when she cried one evening and turned the milk bottle over. She has been in need of the milk of human kindness since the beginning and having found it, is desperate to keep it.

Towards the end of the film the roles are reversed as the woman’s tenderness is awakened and she continually looks out for Tomek who has been recuperating in hospital. She becomes a kind of tender voyeur, as his telescope is replaced by her opera glasses. In another interesting reversal at the very end, she watches over her apartment from Tomek’s telescope in a kind of fantasy play, and can see herself crying over the spilt milk from an earlier scene in which she is crying and at her lowest ebb. Suddenly Tomek appears in the frame and comforts her, tenderly. It is how things might have been. The tragedy therefore is the distance that the two lonely lovers can’t bridge. The music in these final moments is haunting and slow and meditative. This film is a kind of grown up Romeo and Juliet and moving in every way. The emotions may have initially appeared cheap but they have turned in the end to something profound.