Film

New York Film Festival: "The Man from London"

By Daniel Montgomery

Monday, October 1, 2007

Things to do during ‘The Man From London’, premiering today at the New York Film Festival: Catch up on your reading. Balance your checkbook. Thumb-wrestle with the person sitting next to you. Rest your eyes for a while; when you open them again ten minutes later, chances are you’ll be looking at the same shot.

There’s the saying, “I don’t know art, but I know what I like.” Well, ‘The Man From London’ may or may not be art, but I don’t like it. It is a film that resists being liked by anyone but the limited few who will “get it,” a membership I do not count myself among. It is co-written and directed by Béla Tarr, a Hungarian filmmaker I was heretofore unfamiliar with, and based on a novel by Georges Simenon. I am surprised that the source material is a novel; what there is of a story would fit in a pamphlet, or on the back of a cocktail napkin.

Maloin (Miroslav Krobot) is the keeper of a signal tower by the sea. He witnesses a murder, and after doing so he finds himself with a large sum of money. There is a detective looking for the money. There is a man suspected of stealing it. And there is a side plot involving Maloin’s wife (Tilda Swinton, speaking English and dubbed in Hungarian) and his daughter Henriette (Erika Bók), who works a job that demeans her. By the end of an arduous 135 minutes, I lost track even of these simple story threads. Worse, I lost interest, and found myself eagerly anticipating the closing credits.

The press notes for the film describe it thusly: “The film is about desire, man’s indestructible longing for a life of freedom and happiness, about illusions never to be realized — about things that give all of us energy to continue living, to go to sleep and get up day after day …” In the director’s own words, “At one and the same time, it deals with the cosmic and the realistic, the divine and the human and, to my mind, contains the totality of nature and man, just as it contains their pettiness.” These descriptions give you a better idea of the film’s intent than I could, and from reading it you may already know if you’re likely to enjoy it.

But I read those descriptions with a shrug. For me, there was no intellectual, emotional, or even theoretical connection to the material. It exists at a distance, esoteric, stretched across the screen for more than two hours of scenes that go on and on and on. There is a shot of the old wooden door of a shack. What happens inside that shack is pivotal, but eventually all I notice is how long I’m made to look at this door. The shot has no content, no sound but the sea in the background. When a man exits the shack, he is overcome with emotion, though it is not readily apparent what has happened. I was not moved by the scene, only relieved that something new is happening within the frame.

The film is unsatisfying, but that is not to say it is poorly made. On the contrary, it looks and sounds marvelous. Tarr works with cinematographer Fred Kelemen to develop a noir atmosphere with shadows and darkness punctuated by pockets of brightness from street lamps. And composer Mihály Víg’s score develops an eerie, dreamlike tension that bring suspense to some scenes even if we don’t know where the suspense is coming from, or why. These elements come together especially well during the opening scenes, where Maloin witnesses the murder. The camera stalks across the scene from a distance, slowly. We do not understand exactly what we are seeing, and neither does Maloin, from whose perspective we observe the incident. We sense danger and mystery during these opening minutes.

But for every scene of distinct tension, there is another listless shot of a door, or windows with sunlight pouring in, or the face of a woman being given an impossible choice, or one of the many shots of the back of someone’s head. Taken alone, these images would make for handsome and artful stills. You could hang them in a museum or art gallery, and I’d consider them, admire the lighting and detail, appreciate the composition, and I’d be in and out of there in fifteen minutes. ‘The Man from London’ is like attending that exhibit, and being stuck there for the rest of the day.

For More Information, Schedule and Ticket Information on the 45th New York Film Festival click Official Webiste