Fausto
(Canada/Mexico, 70 min.)
Written and directed by Andrea Bussmann
Starring: Alberto Núñez, Victor Pueyo, Gabino Rodríguez, Fernando
Renjifo, Ziad Chakaroun
If Andrea Bussmann’s previous feature was a tale for those who
dreamt, her latest work is a dream realized in its most cinematic form.
Bussmann’s Fausto transports the Faust myth to beaches of Oaxaca,
Mexico for a loose, free-flowing, and hypnotic meditation. It’s a fleeting film
that ebbs and flows in elliptical pauses. Demanding, frustrating, fascinating,
and rewarding, Fausto is a richly
dense exercise in active viewing. Much like a dream that only makes sense when
unpacked and savoured as a metaphorical whole, it’s also a beautifully
evocative film that washes over you and enriches the mind.
The uncanny character of the film is complemented by the peculiar hybrid structure with which Bussmann reimagines the fable. Alberto (Alberto Núñez) and Fernando (Fernando Renjifo) laze on the beach playing games and telling stories. The characters include a handful of migrants, some Oaxacan locals, and an ex-pat American who tell their stories in meandering accounts. They tell stories in an indirect manner, never quiet making eye contact with the camera, but rarely having a perceptible recipient for the fables they share. Their yarns unfurl like interview answers or soliloquies—something between the two, perhaps—as they muse upon the mysteries of the world, deals with the devil, the knowable versus the unknowable, either to Bussmann or to the open ear of the midnight air. Their stories contrast with the omniscient narration (by Gabino Rodríguez) who serves as both an all-seeing eye and an unreliable narrator given that too few images are discernable to the viewer’s eye—there are many shots in which one can’t really understand what transpires onscreen.
The film thrives on the interplay of images, the power of
storytelling, and on the relationship Bussmann conjures between things the
audiences sees and doesn’t see. (Or sees to an extent, in Bussmann’s pitch-black
nocturnes.) Storytelling as at the heart of Fausto
as Bussmann returns to the image of the men sitting around a bonfire on the
beach or a candlelight dinner at night.
The darkness of the images is consistently mesmerizing. Shot on a
Sony a7S digital camera, which retails for around $2000 as an affordable
prosumer device, and then transferred onto 16mm film, the palettes of Fausto visualize myriad contradictions
and tensions that embody Bussmann’s film. The compositions are dark, yet washed
out with the strained exposure grain of the digital camera and rendered with a
bleachy ghostliness afforded by the images’ reproduction on film. Many of the
images are almost entirely black as Bussmann’s camera gazes out to the ocean and
takes in a few stars, which pepper the screen faintly, like small pinholes
through which the light escapes.
Animals appear onscreen, too, in museum displays and daytime
scenes on the beach. Stuffed gazelles stare back from the screen, looking at us
as intently as we look at them, while one of Fausto’s more hypnotic moments watches a dog accompany the men on a
stroll along the violent beach. Waves crash thunderously as the humans make
their way up a rocky cliff and the dog, lacking the proper digits with which to
climb the wall, simply jumps and barks as the waves hit the shore. It’s a scene
of great indirect violence and a reminder of the world in which we’re all
ultimately powerless beings.
Shot like a meditative anthropological or ethnographic film,
Fausto invites audiences to consider
the creatures that frolic on the screen and the natural environment that
engulfs them. The narrator speaks often about the characteristics of nocturnal
animals—creatures that see in the dark and generally can’t be tamed—and by
enshrouding the film in the dark of midnight, Bussmann challenges a viewer to
see the world through the eyes of man, an animal, that is contained by the
world in which he thinks he’s free.
The resulting aesthetic suggests that the world of Fausto is some beguiling between-place
as the men contemplate their state of limbo. The modern and theoretical take on
the classic myth fuses past and present, world and otherworldly, presence and
absence. It’s a tale of shadows and men, and people and their environments. It’s
hard to say what exactly Fausto is or
means, but the spirit of the film leaves an insatiable hunger to know more.
Fausto opens in Toronto on Thursday, April 11 at TIFF Lightbox.
