The Man From London

I started out my festival this year with Hungarian director Bela Tarr's take on film noir, The Man From London. The film is based on a Georges Simenon novel (though not a Maigret), and contains many of the elements of the famous French crime writer (the few that I have read anyway) - a cerebral, almost philosophical slow-motion plot, and a central crisis of morality, rather than crime per se.

However, Tarr is a supreme stylist (I've spent a little while looking him up after seeing TMFL), and his take on Simenon and film noir generally is unlike any I have ever seen. Indeed, his style is completely new to me - though Kyle mentioned Bergman as a possible influence, and I don't disagree - so I'll try to describe the style of the film and its effect, rather than the plot or other elements.

It's shot in rich, beautiful black and white, particularly well suited to its setting, an ancient European port, mostly at night. The key stylistic elements are pace and stillness - Tarr uses long (excruciatingly long on many occassions) shots and a very slow and still camera to evoke the loneliness, monotony, and pain of its central characters' lives. We watch the main character walk from the local bar to the port's breakwall for a minute and a half; we see the same man's wife screaming at him over a misguided purchase of a fur wrap for their daughter, and the camera stays on her for 45 seconds after he has left and she has stopped crying; we watch the detective (the Man From London) interviewing the wife of a key supsect in the robbery (but never mind the plot), and we close in on her face for possibly as long as 7 or 8 minutes - as an interminable accordion plays on and grows in volume. The opening shot of the film is twelve minutes long, half of which is the slowest pan in film history (I'm guessing) up the hull of a passenger ship. There are countless other examples...and yes, I did start using my watch to time some of the by the end. I was curious (and bored). All in tight close up. If you hadn't intuited this already, there's very little talking; I'm guessing about 100 lines of dialogue, and the film is 2hrs 15 long.

So, yes, it was extremely difficult to watch at times. Particularly after you absorb the technical elements, and are waiting for something to "happen". On another level, it was fascinating, and strangely refreshing to find a director who slows everything down - not a common technique these days. And, to be fair, things do happen, the plot does advance in a torpid fashion, to a meaningful conclusion, so that is not a weakness. However, I found that the exaggeration of style largely overwhelmed that plot.

One becomes aware very early on that the agony of watching this, in sharing each character's simplest action, and tortured thought, is at least partially the point of the exercise, but that didn't win me over in the theatre. And so by the third act I was more than ready for it to end. However, after the fact the film continues to resonate - like the languid but powerful pace of a Bruckner symphony (I would have liked to have used Bartok here to keep the Hungarian theme intact, but it's nothing like Bartok). So, if you're up for a unique, very challenging piece of film-making, then sure, why not consider The Man From London. Be brave.