My Five Year Plan

It’s taken me a day to collect my thoughts, but I saw The Man from London yesterday and want to offer some ideas on why it didn’t work for me.

What’s that you say? You didn’t like The Man from London, Bela Tarr’s new adaptation of Georges Simenon’s novel of the same name, and the latest film in Tarr’s ongoing formal quest to explore the grimness of the modern world? You must be some kind of cinematic dilettante without an ounce of taste.

Hold your horses there, pardner. I like me some Tarr - especially Werckmeister Harmonies, but also Satantango (and, at spurts, Damnation). But this just isn’t half the film Werckmeister or Satantango is (in the latter case, literally - it’s only 135 minutes long).

The Man from London is the story of Maloin (Miroslav Krobot, who is terrific in this role), approaching middle-age, with a nagging wife (Tilda Swinton - impossibly poorly dubbed) and a distant teenage daughter (Erika Bok - the little girl from Satantango, all grown up!). One night he witnesses a crime - and walks away with a bag full of English pounds. The film is about the moral ramifications of his viewership and his theft. To say much more would be unfair - there’s very little plot here, of course, though I’d say the film relies much more on conventional plotting (the narrative, slightly retooled and perhaps padded with more action, wouldn’t be out-of-sync with a mid-century programmer) than any of his other collaborations with writer Laszlo Kraznahorkai.

Herein lies the problem - moving away from adapting Kraznohorkai and toward Simenon, Tarr has chosen a work which simply lacks the grandeur and epic scale that his formal strategies necessitate. They’re all on display here - the slow moving long-takes, the Mihaly Vig accordion-and-harmonium scores, the occasional shift into otherworldly styles of performance (Kati Lazar in particular is explosive as a shopkeeper who employs Maloin’s daughter). But they lack the emotional weight of the previous films - two or three sequences aside, no longer do Tarr’s epic camera moves and incredible rigor seem to respond to the narrative; instead, they feel mannered, even rote. Tarr is no longer speaking to his story, but rather to his own inflated ego and his theoretically unsound notions of ‘pure cinema.’

At times the film even borders on the banal, as with some vaguely homophobic undertones to one of the film’s lighter sequences, in which Maloin purchases a gift for his daughter. A pair of endlessly jabbering, effete male shopkeepers (with what seem like lisps - I don’t know enough Hungarian to say for sure) rupture the film’s somber tone with a ridiculously overstated pitch. There’s a rhythmic, psalmic quality to their line readings, but it simply seems patently false - the scene is probably the worst one I’ve seen in a Tarr film.

It’s not all bad, though. As I said - the performances are nearly uniformly terrific, and the film is admirable if nothing else on an aesthetic level - let the black and white tones wash over you. And the film seems to represent something of an advance for Tarr’s use of lenses - I don’t recall nearly as much emphasis on zoom lenses in his previous films, or in long primes, for that matter. Given how much surveillance and observation are the principle themes Tarr is exploring (Maloin’s station at the harbor from which he witnesses the inciting incidents are designed like a panopticon), the emphasis on a wider variety of lens lengths, and indeed on the ability of the human eye to focus on detail, is key.

Would I recommend seeing this? Absolutely - Tarr is an indispensible filmmaker and every new work of his should be experienced and explored. But will I watch this monolith again? Not anytime soon.

Special shoutout to my good friend Caroline - the only reason I was able to see this yesterday was because she wasn’t able to go, and was awesome enough to offer me her ticket. Thank you, Caroline!