(1994; Czech, dubbed in English) Employing live actors, stop-motion animation, Claymation, and special effects, Jan Svankmajer recreates the story of Dr Faust's pact with Mephistopheles, borrowing from the plays of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Christian Dietrich Grabbe, and Christopher Marlowe.

As he steps from a subway tunnel, a man (Petr Cepek) is handed a leaflet with a map, which he promptly tosses away. (The two men passing out the leaflets reappear in different guises throughout the film; they are the unnamed man's demons.) Inside his apartment, from which a chicken has exited, leaving behind excrement on the floor, he finds a similar map in his mail and an egg inside a loaf of bread. When he cracks open the egg, a window bursts open.

The man uses the map to explore, seeing fruit rot before his eyes, before he enters a building where he dons a heavy black cape with white stars, applies face paint and a beard, and reads (up until this point there had been no discernible spoken language) poetic lines from a book. When a red light flashes and a bell rings, he leaves the room in what appears to be the backstage of a theater. After removing the costume and makeup, he cuts through a canvas screen and enters a dark passage that leads into an alchemist's laboratory.

From here the man becomes Faust and summons Mephistopheles, the tempter, who through his master Lucifer agrees to provide Faust with pleasure and power for 24 years: "So he will buy my service with his soul." Most of these events take place through the actions of large puppets, including a jester, devils, and angels.

Other surreal scenes involving a table that spouts wine, an old man carrying a severed leg wrapped in newspaper, and dancers in a farmer's field reinforce an atmosphere of incomprehensibility. Are we to take any of this seriously?

Faust, breaking free from his puppet strings, (occasionally needing to read from a script) demands from the devil access to "the governing force of life … the pulse of nature." This Lucifer says he cannot provide since it is beyond words and mortal comprehension. "The devil knows no more than we poor fools," concludes Faust.

After appearing before the king of Portugal and performing a few tricks, which the king sees through and then accuses the magician of sorcery, Faust calls upon his powers to flood the land and then plays skittles on the surface of the deluge. Weary of mere pleasures, Faust begins to repent of his sins, but Mephistopheles resorts to one last deception, disguising himself as a beautiful woman to lure Faust back into his clutches. The mortal ending is fatal.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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