The Man from London

Bela Tarr's adaptation of a 1934 George Simenon novel, The Man from London, (2007)devotes extraordinary cinematic resources to a trite story that's not really worth telling.  A sullen, uncommunicative dock worker observes a murder and retrieves a briefcase full of cash from the crime scene.  A sinister inspector and one of the thugs involved in the crime search for the missing money.  The dock worker buys various things that he could not otherwise afford and quarrels with his wife (played by Tilda Swinton in a bizarre, hysterically over-the-top performance).  In the end, the money is seized by the inspector, the thug is killed, and, presumably, everything reverts to the soul-destroying tedium that is Tarr's stock-in-trade.  This story was old when told as a parable in Chaucer's "The Pardoner's Tale"; a variant on this narrative is Sam Raimi's 1998 A Simple Plan in which a man discovers a crashed plane and bushels of cash in the Minnesota woods.  To make the story work, the protagonist must be a person of limited means, trapped in a pointless, if reassuringly familiar, existence, a man of conventional values who is tempted by the ill-gotten wealth thrust upon him. Tarr, working with a fellow Hungarian, the novelist, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, is mostly uninterested in the moral aspects of the story and wholly indifferent to creating any sense of suspense or, even, interest in the formulaic tale.  Instead, his focus seems to be on the position of the bystander per se, the perspective of the man who observes things from a remote standpoint and, then, is destroyed when he becomes a participant in the action.  Probably, Tarr sees the perspective of his laconic hero as being similar to the plight of a filmmaker or, perhaps, an artist in general -- the artist observes, sometimes is rewarded for his observations with briefcases full of cash, but, upon losing his dispassionate isolation from events, runs the risk of being mugged or worse.  (It's the madam's advice to her superannuated whores -- "when you start coming with the customers, it's time to retire.") This is not an inherently frivolous approach to this kind of material -- in fact, several of Hitchcock's greatest films foreground the role of the observer, the man who sees something that he should not have seen and, then, finds himself embroiled in intrigue and, even, complicit in crime:  this is the plot of North by Northwest, The Man who knew too much, and, of course, most famously, Rear Window.  Indeed, Tarr's meticulous, if audience-punishing, mise-en-scene strongly suggests an abstract and hyper-formalist adaptation of some of Hitchcock's characteristic obsessions.  It's interesting in principle but, for most audiences, the problem will be that Tarr's takes are painfully extended and his camera-work (as well as editing) designed to alienate the viewer.  He often films scenes from angles intentionally chosen to obscure what is happening, Tarr's point being that the characters enmeshed in the action don't really know what is happening either -- this is intellectually admissible, but, practically, problematic with respect to a two minute shot of the back of someone's head looming over a desolate alleyway while odd sounds occur off-screen.  The opening seven or eight minutes is a tour de force -- we see the huge wedge-like prow of a vessel at harbor, shot at night with half the screen blazing white, the other half sunk in deep shadow, seemingly, an illustration, in a simple-minded way, of the distinction between good and bad (visualized as light and dark) that the film will confound.  The camera slowly tracks right to left from inside some kind of structure that periodically imprints on the image huge blurred "x"-shapes, some kind of struts in the foreground that we can't quite see.  We watch people leaving the ship, departing down a gangplank to a forlorn-looking little train; the last guy to leave the ship moves to the left on the deck, throws a briefcase off the vessel onto the pier and, then, moves through the ship to the opposite side where the train is waiting.  We discover, after about ten minutes, that the camera is mounted in a kind of surveillance tower, a perch where the dock worker hero, Maloin, the film's protagonist, has observed the brief case being cast off the ship, the struggle over the brief case, and, then, the murder of the man who threw the valise ashore.  The control tower is the governing metaphor for the film, an elevated vantage from which action can be safely observed -- the hero's problem is that he becomes entangled in the events that he sees.  The film's atmosphere is dank, shadowy, and impoverished -- this is curious because the film was shot in Corsica and some of the scenes show a Mediterranean harbor similar to the bright, white-washed places that I recall in Cefalu or Taormina, Sicily.  Somehow Tarr and Kraznahorkai have transformed a Mediterranean seaside resort into a dismal, foggy harbor on the Baltic Sea -- the gaunt looking wharfside houses look the buildings in Murnau's Nosferatu.  The town is mostly full of old men with grizzled white beards.  The old men hang out at a staple in Tarr's films, the old man bar -- in one scene, we hear a disconsolate accordion being played and the camera drifts away from the narrative to show the female accordionist, a pool table, and two old men one of whom is dancing while jauntily balancing a billiard ball on his forehead while the other elderly drunk seems to be doing a polka with a chair for his partner:  the scene looks very much like the sequence in The Werckmeister Harmonies in which the hero configures the old drunks in a rural tavern to spin and rotate like the planets in the solar system.  The black and white photography is fantastically accomplished and features a tremendous range of light effects:  when a woman opens a window, the entire room blazes white and the picture is bleached into nothingness -- when she shuts the window, the whole room reverts to a cavernous darkness. One of Tarr's favorite female actresses, a little the worse for wear, a plump, dark-haired seductress, surfaces in one of the bar scenes -- the bar man strokes her breast as she leers at him from beneath her plumed hat.  (I recall the actress from Satantango where she serves as the all-purpose temptress for the various rural louts in that film -- she's startlingly depraved looking and I greatly prefer her bedraggled gypsy look to the pallid, worm-like Tilda Swinton.)  The Man from London is a remarkable exercise in style but without any substantive content at all.