|
From underworld to otherworld is a matter of form, thus Michael Mann's Faust. A Wehrmacht platoon in the Carpathian alps, a pit stop for "the masters of the world" to be confronted with the vortex of their own psyches. The medieval fortress in the misty Romanian village is "constructed backwards" to keep something locked in, its lore doesn't impress the captain (Jürgen Prochnow) who's experienced war: "The bad dreams of your keep are nursery rhymes in comparison." To decipher is the presiding challenge, there are ancient texts for the ailing Jewish professor (Ian McKellen) and an amalgam of uncanny imagery for the viewer. Sham übermenschen distracted by treasure, the real one responds with a laser blast that makes charred carcasses out of greedy grunts. The crux of immemorial and modern evil turns out to be a sinewy Golem, first glimpsed as a cloud of smoke carrying the scientist's daughter (Alberta Watson) to safety. "A traveler from everywhere" (Scott Glenn) is the opposite pole, he departs for the showdown before a seesawing horizon at dusk. "Romantic fairy-tales you dress up in black and silver so you can look in the mirror and maybe believe them." The riposte to Raiders of the Lost Ark is but the beginning of a complicated welter of phantasmagorical superfices, with reflections of The Ghost of Frankenstein, Quatermass and the Pit, Teorema, Castle Keep, Duelle and The Shout. Glowing eyes and talismans, doppelgängers in backlit slow-mo and Tangerine Dream's ethereal electronica—it would be Mann, wouldn't it, who sets his fable in 1941 and offers a futuristic vision. Albers' Structural Constellations and Dalí's Corpus Hypercubus figure tellingly in the continuous abstraction, a sense of berserk pulp kept rigorously in check. (Hooper in Lifeforce runs with it.) "Er strebt nach Wahrheit..." Cinematography by Alex Thomson. With Gabriel Byrne, Robert Prosky, W. Morgan Sheppard, and Michael Carter.
--- Fernando F. Croce |