AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Tayloriona Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Kaydan Christian A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

freebart I like Simenon as an author and Tarr as a director, so an adaptation of a Simenon novel by Tarr raised my interest. Tarr has resumed his Ars Poetica with the two words "human dignity", and in this he resembles Simenon, who also portrays with compassion even his most wretched characters. I think Simenon would have liked this film of Tarr, as he was fond of plastic scenes, and strove for plastic descriptions. I do not know what Simenon might have said of the slow pace of the film or the reduced plot. There is a slowness to his books also, but also many action, dialog, tension, humor etc. As for me, the slowness annoyed me a bit, as in all films of Tarr, yet I was watching it on the video and jumped the scenes I found boring. The overall effect of the film was good and it was lasting as well.

GManfred I hadn't seen a film by Bela Tarr before, and at first I was put off by the slow, deliberate style - the first scene took about 15 minutes and was agonizingly slow. The whole picture moved at the same lethargic pace and I thought it was remindful of an Ingmar Bergman film. I never felt comfortable with Bergman as I thought his style pretentious, but I got a different feeling from watching "The Man From London".The slow pace, as in the languid opening shot, accentuates the prevailing mood of the film, and lends motivation (or lack of) to the protagonist Maloin. He is a simple man who has resigned himself to his fate, a boring, tedious existence as a night watchman with a shrewish wife (Tilda Swinton, in a role that is too small), until his life is turned upside down when he witnesses a murder from his watchtower. The picture is full of long, lingering closeups and long shots and the characters speak in the same deliberate manner as the pacing of the film.I suppose if he had wanted to, Tarr could have edited out about 30 minutes of film to speed it up, but he would have ruined the overall effect of the picture, which exemplifies the predominant mental state of Maloin and the struggle with his conscience that has thrown his life into chaos. You have probably seen films you would like better but you have never seen one as offbeat or as memorable as "The Man From London". Serious movie fans ought to include this one in their respective film canons - it is very worth seeing will certainly throw your list into disarray.

Ilpo Hirvonen Bela Tarr is a Hungarian director renowned for his minimalism and extremely long shots. His films have shocked the world - especially the incredible length (7h 15 minutes) of his magnum opus Sátántangó (1994) - with their ambiguity and uniqueness. In his films Tarr combines tragic elements with absurdly comic, but there's never linear dramatic structure. His art is a combination of Tarkovsky's slow, monotonous shots and camera movement, and Bresson's static camera that picks small details for us to observe. In the aesthetics of Tarr the states start turning into physical places and details become more than important. The Man from London was his first international film, followed by The Turin Horse (2010) which is - according to Tarr - his final film.After Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) it took five years for Tarr to get a chance to work with a feature-length film. In 2005 Tarr started to film The Man from London but the producer suddenly committed a suicide. After emotional and financial difficulties the film got a new producer and was finished in 2007. It's minimalist as usual but has surprisingly many dramatic ingredients for Tarr: A man lives in the island of Corsica with his wife and daughter. He works at the dock, supervising it and its train service. One day he witnesses a crime from his glass ivory tower; two men fight because of a suitcase and the other dies. The man takes advantage of this situation and goes to pick up the case - full of money.The crime plot is just part of the frame-story, even that the cinematography is at times very noir-like, as it was in Tarr's earlier film Damnation (1988). It's quite an unusual story for him but it's not the story that fascinates us. It's the images, sound-scape and the wonderful entirety. Bela Tarr's work can easily be separated into two parts: The first consists of his Hungarian features that tried to depict social reality through documentary-like style. The second was opened by Damnation (1988) where the films turned black-and-white, dramatic ingredients were cut to minimum and the length of the shots grew. Sátántangó was the culmination of this profound aesthetic reorientation.Another difference between these two eras is the depiction of time and place. The documentary-like fictions were set in certain cities, depicting the Hungarian reality. But in the second part the milieus turned into unclear rural communities which tried to depict a more universal and abstract world. The Man from London doesn't exactly take place in countryside as Damnation, Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies do, but it also portrays an abstract world. The characters live in a rural community; general stores, old shacks and run-down clothes. The East-European reality exhaled from Tarr's Hungarian films but The Man from London is strictly universal with its pessimistic world view and depiction of essential themes of humanity.There are many things that could be brought up about the film, such as the brilliant development of aesthetics and the construction of the state, the relation between sound and image, and the time of the film. But perhaps the most important thing is how the cinematographer, Fred Kelemen, uses light. As we know film is art of light, and it feels that no one else understands it as beautifully as Bela Tarr does today. This is another strong parallel to Andrei Tarkovsky who's probably Tarr's biggest influence. Just as in the films by Tarkovsky (especially in Nostalghia and The Sacrifice) in The Man from London, the state builds up and develops through light. Once the viewer can see a luminous - ethereal - state and then suddenly it changes to a dark one, full of agony and despair. The ending is one extremely intriguing example of this. As the camera first films the face of the woman and then the image overexposes. In cinema it is very important whether you fade to black or overexpose the image to an ethereal state. The significance of the state should not be forgotten, as film is both art of light and art of state. The Man from London is a unique masterpiece for its style, content and philosophy. It's Kafkaesque for its absurd black-humor and existentialist for its philosophy of film and characterization; we're thrown into the world, doomed to be free and forced to give our life a meaning. Existentialism and the absurdity of being are all part of Bela Tarr's art, and it reinforces the desolate despair in his films. Bela Tarr hardly ever cuts (the film lasts for over two hours and consists of 26 shots) but he uses a lot of internal montage; when the camera moves the dimensions of the image change and the entire state changes, without a cut. The film is Bressonian minimalist and Tarkovskyan poetic; it's important to see that Tarr doesn't try to reach realism nor naturalism. The Man from London is very expressionistic for its cinematographic style and visuals but there is something more in the black-and-white images than just aesthetic styling. Color is an over-naturalist element for Tarr and using black-and-white film he makes it sure that the reality of cinema and the Reality remain separated.It's a film where nothing happens but where, on the other hand, everything happens. The Man from London has an inconsolable world view and disconsolate despair. It's incredibly pessimistic depicting the hopelessness of the world and the decay of morality. All the characters of it live in an unclear place but are all trapped. They can't move forward; they're stuck in their desolate situations and are pretty much going to die in them. The protagonist feels powerful at his work, he supervises and controls the environment but at home, in his personal life, he can't come to terms with his existence and is unable of facing his troubles - he is a prisoner of his own limited world. Optimism for a better life, the hope for something better changes him, and his morality.

Stanislas Lefort The storyline is taken from a Georges Simenon novel, L'Homme de Londres (1934). In an interview in 2001, Béla Tarr avowed: "I believe that you keep making the same film throughout your whole life." His most recent work upholds this declaration, placing itself squarely in line with his previous feature-length films, especially Damnation (1988), Sátántangó (Satan's Tango) (1994) et Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). These four films share identical layouts of the credits, black-and-white film, minimalist dialogues, long scenes, and stories that are more suggestive than narrative in nature. Most of Tarr's actors are not professionals and several appear in different films, notably Erika Bók who is Estike in Sátántangó and Henriette in The Man from London. As for the handful of foreign actors, they are dubbed into Hungarian.If it was amusing to see Gyula Pauer play the innkeeper in two films, his third appearance in The Man from London indicates that the choice is deliberate. Same with the role of Henriette (Maloin's daughter), assigned to Erika Bók, who appeared as Estike (the child with the cat) in Sátántangó. In all of Tarr's stories, the innkeeper appears as one, single person. This is also true of Estike and Henriette who share a common destiny as child-victims. And yet Tarr only winks at us across the characters of different films; the most ordinary actions are equally allusions throughout all his works creating a universe of apparently insignificant habits. Maloin drinks in accordance with the same ritual as the neighbor-informer of Sátántangó. And when he throws a log on his fire, the stove in the first image of Werckmeister Harmonies springs to mind. So many habits in which the insignificant becomes significant because the images and the characters of Tarr's ceaselessly question one another: their existence is a succession of futile, routine gestures whose repetition bears witness to their vanity. Habits are simultaneously both their prison and their lifeline in the labyrinth of existence, giving them something to hold onto while, at the same time, preventing them from escaping their condition. True, the protagonists seek to purify their existence (Valuska), to change their destiny (Karrer, Irimiás, Maloin), to reverse the course of History (Eszter and his theories of sound). But they are inevitably reeled back in and crushed.Though the decor and the ambiance are consistent with classic film noir, the unraveling of the plot is so exact that two viewings are necessary in order to begin to understand. But, at the base of things, the story doesn't really matter. What Tarr shows us is less a criminal entanglement than the poles between which the characters oscillate. First there is the black and the white, admirably opposed in the first scene where half of the ship's body is illuminated. The screen is black at the beginning of the film; it is white at the end. The music is also bipolar. From the first notes of a long arpeggio, we believe we hear an organ, then realize it is the sirens of ships. In Homer's Odyssey, the song of the Sirens, inaccessible feminine creatures, threw the sailors off-course so that their ships ran aground on the reefs. Here, the song of the sirens is like a requiem. This dirge contrasts with the accordion ritornello, reminiscent of the inns in Sátántangó and Damnation. With Tarr, bistros are always places of escape where one re-creates the world, gets drunk, and devises the most absurd projects. The melody, acting as a setting for these hallucinations, allows death to be forgotten, but which the arpeggio obstinately calls back to mind. Its minor key and its infinite nostalgia only make it less able to elude destiny.Where does The Man from London fit into Tarr's works? In the first scene – a shot twelve minutes in length – the lens surveys and captures the entire space in a way unknown to the tracking in Tarr's other works, and shows, by its fluidity and freedom, at what point the characters are prisoners of their own gravitation. The camera seems to have wings so it may better watch the men and love them, without ever judging them. In this way, it is sister to Damiel and Cassiel, the two angels of Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987). Like them, Tarr's camera leisurely insinuates itself, beyond concepts of time, and penetrates the heart of beings, ready to capture each of their convulsions in a world where the only certainty is death, humanity's habit par excellence. Looking at the earlier films, several of the characters in The Man from London bring an unexpected contrast. Such as the Inspector Molisson, who seems above the law and alone brings justice. No other film of Tarr's has a main character so tenuously attached to the human condition. His behavior with Maloin and Mrs. Brown is Christ-like, in a manner of speaking. He consoles; he cleanses sins; he tries to console. In comparison, Mrs. Brown seems like Anna Schmid, Harry Lime's mistress in The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949). Both women were used to entrap the man they loved. Both women, in the last images of the films, refuse compensation and disappear, dignity intact. In the end, Maloin, marred by sudden wealth, seeks redemption by turning himself in. He isn't sure if Molisson's pardon will allow him to find peace once again. The glass harp that punctuates the siren arpeggio as Molisson re-enacts the toss of the suitcase greets only Molisson's discovery of the truth. The final notes of the film, still played on the glass harp, mark the end of the inspector's work and the end of the riddle. Life continues for Maloin and Mrs. Brown with both their doubts and failures. But what makes The Man from London a new development in the works of Béla Tarr is the fact that this film brings together so perfectly cinematography, music, and plot line, creating a complete and emotional spectacle about the human condition.(Thanks to Jessica Alexander for the English translation!)