L'Homme de Londres

When you were a kid, did you ever hear the phrase, "You'll understand when you're older"? This weighty, grinding, almost intimidatingly lugubrious film from iconic filmmaker Béla Tarr may make you cringe in your seat as if it is all just too awful to understand.

The Man From London is interminable hours of the most hauntingly composed black and white photography you could see for a long time. There's slow symbolism dense enough to sink the Titanic. You'd beg them to crank the movie faster, but daren't in case it's a masterpiece. As a stylistic exercise it leaves you gasping, but working it all out is another matter. There's a Wagnerian majesty to it. A dignity that defies intellectual comprehension. At least until it has had time to sink in at a deeper level.

The opening shot made me think of that boat that ferried the dead across the River Styx. We see the hull of the ship. It is drained of colour and sunlight. Eventually waves of darkness drift down across the screen like eyelids closing. We are forced to contemplate it. The shimmer of lamplight on the damp dockside. Looking out through the lattice squares of a window, train lines frame the noirish scene. Low key lighting and oblique angles evoke a sense of dread.

We have panned back to take in more of the ship in the desolate jetty. This could be somewhere in Eastern Europe. Somewhere you pull your coat collar around you tight to keep out the damp, dank feelings permeating everything. Somewhere you'd rather not be alone.

Diagonal foreground lines of an overcoat collar intersect our view. We look over the shoulder of someone (Maloin) watching the scene below. There, men dressed in black woollen overcoats and hats. Only their faces highlighted. Steam issuing from between the wheels of a waiting train. A wordless conspiracy over a suitcase. Feel the cold, clammy atmosphere of undetermined threat.

The Man from London proceeds not at the speed of hell freezing over. More like a hell frozen over long ago and never to thaw. Ever. A place from which there is no escape. A god-forsaken wasteland.

The plot, what there is of it, is taken from a story by Simenon. It involves the discovery of a suitcase of money that railway switchman Maolin fishes out of the drink. The corpse comes later. The dosh was stolen. But the mystery, while satisfyingly concluded in its own good time, is little more than a pretext. Enigmatic justice dispensed by a police inspector takes our mind off to unexpected pathways. Hope, hopelessness, redemption (and without any simplistic religious overtones). Justice and humanity. But the real power of the film is in its formalist rejection of cinematic convention. There is a plot, but it is not plot-driven. The landscape, the bare-furnished rooms, are all protagonists, as much as the sullen and uncommunicative characters.

The cinematography cuts the air like a Baltic ice-axe and supports the film's main theses. We first see Tilda Swinton, Maloin's wife, almost as a hidden part of this surly man's own persona. The camera pans up slowly from behind Maloin, revealing her slight figure as she sits opposite him. In another scene, she goes to the window and is totally engulfed by sunshine for a brief second until she closes the shutters to let him sleep. Inside Maolin and his humdrum existence is hope for dignity, for something better. But it seems so unlikely that he can barely face the possibility. Precisely focused shots draw attention to tiny, grimy detail (often further enhanced by use of 'chiaroscuro' deep-shadows lighting). The grain of wood or the lines on skin, or even fingernails. We feel Maloin's almost invincible acceptance of his lot at a painfully deep level.

Compositions have the breathtaking precision and deliberateness of such Tarkovsky masterpieces as Andrei Rublev, but with the megalithic slowness that is one of Tarr's trademarks.

Apart from forcing us to contemplate much more deeply than we are used to in a world of fast-moving, CGI-enhanced cinema, the slowing-down reveals other interesting effects. In one scene, there is a long, unmoving head-shot of the murderer's wife under questioning. She says nothing for several minutes, but we see the gradual build-up of emotion in her features (the scene is reminiscent of Andy Warhol's Screen Tests, which are fortuitously exhibiting in the Edinburgh Festival at the same time as the UK premiere of The Man From London).

The forlorn beauty of The Man From London might inspire you to question the assumptions we make about cinema, instilling a deeper appreciation of the aesthetic possibilities of this wondrous art form. Or you may leave disenchanted, claiming that, however wonderful the characterisation and deep-stage photography exhibition might be, it seems rather less than the sum of its parts. Either way, the coldness of the atmosphere will have eaten into you to such an extent that you long for a bowl of hot soup or a mug of warming coffee. Your body wants to escape the implacable struggles and silences, the constant dirge-like accordion, the austere minimalism, and dialogue designed as much for its audio qualities as its content. And if you do, I hope, like me, you will look back and treasure what you might almost dismiss.

The night is quiet, shapes of faint, lifeless forms in the grim perimeters about, the streets lie black and steaming in these alien reaches of a city of curious architecture, much like yours perhaps. This is a world lying in wait, beset by a thing unknown.

When it finally comes it's the hull of a ship, a long vertical shot tracking across a vessel that looks like a bleached bone of a whale washed out on shore. The camera moves three times back and forth on its tracks, as though some kind of ritual must be performed for this to begin.

There's not much plot or story to speak of. A suitcase full of money. A crime committed. Smalltime crooks and an ordinary man in the wrong place the wrong time. The banality of a plot so unmistakeably familiar contrasted with intimate moments, people living some kind of life. Small bursts of life woven into a genre framework so frail and transparent as though to be nonexistent, a form of dramatic percussion to the wandering and the aimlessness. Staccato rhythms throughout the movie abet this, the passage of time. The thumps of a ball on a wall, sounds of billiard from an adjucent room, the slashes of a meat-cleaver, rhythms to which existence can dissipate.

Transfixing and hypnotic, this is the visual equivalent to the albums of drone artists Sunn0))) and their 14 minute monotonous drones. Mostly aural, Tarr's camera ferries us back and forth in these godless corridors, where our only bearing is time.

It doesn't come from anywhere nor goes, it's rather a mantra, whereby repeating it we can concentrate on the texture of the sound itself. And how it reverberates.

In "The man from London" an ordinary civilian finds by accident a lot of money originating from a criminal transaction. We regularly find this story element in films, for example in "No country for old men" (Ethan and Joel Coen) from the same year.

How different do these two films elaborate on this basic ingredient. In "No country for old men" the "lucky" finder is being chased by a hit man and the emphasis is on action. In "The man from London" the finder is chased by his own guilty feelings and the emphasis is much more on internal psychological elements.

Needless to say that also in the Tarr film the finder ends up everything but lucky. The film has the usual Tarr elements as slowness, bleakness and beautiful images. Especially the first half hour has striking black and white imagery.

Watching this movie I realised that the mood of a Tarr movie has much in common with the mood of a Kaurismaki movie. Erika Bokk belongs to a Tarr movie just as much as Kati Outinen belongs to a Kaurismaki movie. Music from an accordian is indispensable for a Tarr movie just as much as the Finnish tango is for a Kaurismaki movie.

As beautiful as the images are so artificial and clumsy is the dialogue, especially the dialogue of the English inspector . This is in my opinion the main reason why "The man from London" does not for a single moment succeed in its attempt to be a neo noir Tarr style.

Self-indulgent, boring piece of garbage; the worst sin a director can commit. This is the slowest, least interesting attempt at film-making that I have ever seen. I'm sure the co-directors/ "writers" must have sat through the rushes by themselves and patted themselves on the back. I don't see how the other cast and crew could sit with them and keep straight faces. I can't believe there are people who fund this garbage; they must have money to burn. I only wish I'd seen the reviews before paying to rent it. Although I'd be even more upset if I had paid to see it in a theatre. Did I see correctly? Did this garbage actually get some kind of award at Cannes?

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.