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There’s a common belief that the German poet Goethe would give Shakespeare a run for his money if the title of “Greatest Writer Ever” were to be awarded.
Goethe’s most relevant piece of art, and still discussed today, is the tragic play Faust.
How does Faust relate to British filmmaker Kemal Yildirin’s Shades of a Killer? Well, for starters, I was first trying to get a glimpse of Goethe’s imaginary world when Shades of A Killer happened to be next in line to be reviewed.
These two seemed to fit together nicely in aiding comprehension of both Faust, who sells his soul to the devil but in the end, is redeemed, and Jaan, Yildirim’s reflective assassin in the movie he writes and directs.
Like Faust, Jaan realizes that life is mostly a matter of moral choices. Some try to straddle these two opposite worlds. On one hand, some people support love while on the other they procreate hate. And on the other side, both characters of Faust and Jaan discover themselves wrapped in darkness while always hoping to return to the light.
Theologians often approach this in what they term a developmental approach to redemption, otherwise known as “don’t stop trying, you will eventually get there”. This is depicted in the dynamic between Mephistopheles and Faust as narrated by Goethe. Mephistopheles represents the proverbial Devil who facilitates Faust’s transgressions, and from a theological standpoint, he embodies the ‘evil’ side of a necessary evil. Thinkers like John Hicke (and St Irenaeus before him) suggest that without characters such as Mephistopheles, people would not have the required motivation to subdue and conquer the dreadful and foster the virtuous. Hence, Mephistopheles refers to himself as
As a psychotic mosaic of Mephistopheles and Faust, Jaan’s wife hopes to start afresh while Jaan sinks deeper into the violent nefarious world of turf wars.
This is indeed the film’s greatest virtue. Jaan is much more than a top gun–he is an extraordinary martial artist as well, and that’s one more interesting twist. In numerous sequences, leather-coated opponents put down their weapons in favor of good, lowbrow kung-style fighting which is almost all well done.
It’s an extremely gripping movie, for sure. It has some raw humane softness though. Some of the minor parts are pretty caricatured, possibly because it is based on comic books, while the main characters are fully fleshed out. The gentle and tender we can sort it out moments between Jaan and his wife generously sprinkle balance and hope into the premise.
And thus we return to the parallel with Faust, which moves with staggering fluidity between heaven and hell. Shades of a Killer, much like Faust, is puzzlingly realistic and dream-like, both brutal and intoxicating. The film’s grim blend of moral and stylistic tension whenever it chooses to come holds our focus to the last scene. Without revealing too much, it closes with a lighthearted irony that is unexpected, but not too much in the style of Alfred Hitchcock, Quentin Tarantino, and film Noir.
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