FAUSTO (Andrea Bussmann). 70 minutes. Opens Friday (April 12) at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See listing. Rating: NNN
Some of the most interesting films to come out in recent years exist in a nexus between narrative, experimental and documentary. Canadian director Andrea Bussmann’s highly aestheticized take on the Faust legend and its various iterations (particularly Goethe’s) exemplifies that direction, with striking nocturnal photography and an unhurried atmosphere that’s ideal for a big-screen experience.
On Mexico’s Oaxacan coast, an unseen narrator drifts between Faustian characters, and some locals, who tell a series of stories. The deal-making devil comes in the form of a storyteller who frames themes of money and power in the context of colonialism. Friends Fernando (Fernando Renjifo) and Alberto (Alberto Núñez), taking up residence in a beach community, subtly underlie the themes further.
Many of the stories revolve around themes of light, shadow and blindness. A woman tells a story about a mysterious house that emits a blue light that, legend has it, contains a supermarket that lets you buy whatever you want, but when you exit, you die. Another is about a colonial explorer who uses a lunar eclipse to trick a group of natives into thinking that he stole the moon.
The narrator also relates a handful of stories about blind spots and telepathy in animals and provides a list of nocturnal animals that, the voiceover notes, “cannot be domesticated.”
Knowledge and enlightenment are traded like Faustian currency, but Bussmann seems to revere more instinctual feelings that are associated with darkness. Her camera frequently lingers on swaths of black night and shadow as if more interested in negative space than conventional action.
Some of the storytellers are colloquial, others are self-consciously stagey and literary. Bussmann’s eye finds a nice mediation between those two styles with camerawork and framing that seems casual but is also striking. The film seems low-key but it is full of ideas that deepen with repeat viewings.
This spin on Faust feels its way through the universe, taking the book’s capitalist critiques and intriguingly plugging them into contemporary questioning and then abstracting them into nature.
@KevinRitchie
