"All stories have resolved themselves. All that remains is time." - Bela Tarr
Bela Tarr directs "The Man From London." The plot? Maloin is a grim-faced railroad employee. He sits in a signal cage all night, pulling giant levers which cause rail tracks and train signals to alternate. In other words, he makes choices for a living. These choices, of course, have ramifications; they literally "change the course of things".
One day Maloin witnesses a murder, a small briefcase being lost in the scuffle. He retrieves this briefcase and opens it up to find six thousand dollars in stolen cash. Maloin faces a moral dilemma. Does he keep the money or does he return it to the authorities?
It's a familiar, noirish plot, but Tarr handles the material in his own inimitable way. This is a world of infinite seas and lustrous blacks, the film's characters rarely speaking, Tarr's camera observing them all with agonisingly slow long takes. Many have complained that the film is "boring" and "listless", but these are characters who have long accepted a kind of slow and inevitable deterioration. They've chosen to live in complete isolation, succumbing to a kind of existential dead-lock; no amount of action will halt death, so they stew in their own private miseries.
And so the antagonist of this film is time itself. Time is a monster, Tarr says in interviews, his Hungarian drawl like a discordant piano. Time sucks and draws blood, reducing its players to mechanical ghouls, alienated and resigned to fate.
But of course Maloin sees a way out. This little briefcase of money could bring him happiness, couldn't it? The film thus becomes a sort of religious parable, the temptations of a new life seducing Maloin. Does he reject the money and embrace a kind of ontological damnation or does he embrace the money and hope for some brief respite? If you've seen Tarr's other films, you know the answer.
Elsewhere the film uses the tropes of noir – high contrast lighting, men in coats, a crime, a moral dilemma, a prowling police inspector, cold urban spaces etc – but Tarr has flattened these signifiers and placed them within a world that is comprised of four clearly demarcated planes.
There's the domestic space (the home in which we eat/sleep/defecate), the space of entertainment or amusement (the bar, where our hero plays chess, gets drunk etc), the space of labour (the railroad and harbour) and beyond (the infinite ocean). The first 3 spaces sit next to the ocean. They teeter fearfully beside this limitless mass of black, always threatening to fall in. The ocean - thick, black and inky - is the final plane. A plane of murder and perhaps spiritual and physical death.
Indeed, water has such a strong impression on the inhabitants of this world that when Maloin sees his daughter sweeping water out of a shop - pushing back time - he immediately resolves to make her happy, forcing her to quit her job and buying her a fancy new coat. But of course it's no use. These are empty purchases, idyllic gestures which Maloin doesn't believe in anyway; he believes solely so that she may temporarily hope, the reverse of the characters in Tarr's "Damnation", who cut down the beliefs and hopes of others so that everyone might partake in a kind of communal misery. Significantly, when Maloin argues with his wife over the purchase, Tarr's instinct is to cut to the little girl mechanically eating a bowl of soup. Spoon after spoon she swallows...spoon...after...spoon...
8/10 – Tarr seems to be repeating himself here, and aesthetically the film's not as strong as his best work. For those who find the film ponderously slow, watch it at x2 speed. Worth two viewings.
Bela Tarr directs "The Man From London." The plot? Maloin is a grim-faced railroad employee. He sits in a signal cage all night, pulling giant levers which cause rail tracks and train signals to alternate. In other words, he makes choices for a living. These choices, of course, have ramifications; they literally "change the course of things".
One day Maloin witnesses a murder, a small briefcase being lost in the scuffle. He retrieves this briefcase and opens it up to find six thousand dollars in stolen cash. Maloin faces a moral dilemma. Does he keep the money or does he return it to the authorities?
It's a familiar, noirish plot, but Tarr handles the material in his own inimitable way. This is a world of infinite seas and lustrous blacks, the film's characters rarely speaking, Tarr's camera observing them all with agonisingly slow long takes. Many have complained that the film is "boring" and "listless", but these are characters who have long accepted a kind of slow and inevitable deterioration. They've chosen to live in complete isolation, succumbing to a kind of existential dead-lock; no amount of action will halt death, so they stew in their own private miseries.
And so the antagonist of this film is time itself. Time is a monster, Tarr says in interviews, his Hungarian drawl like a discordant piano. Time sucks and draws blood, reducing its players to mechanical ghouls, alienated and resigned to fate.
But of course Maloin sees a way out. This little briefcase of money could bring him happiness, couldn't it? The film thus becomes a sort of religious parable, the temptations of a new life seducing Maloin. Does he reject the money and embrace a kind of ontological damnation or does he embrace the money and hope for some brief respite? If you've seen Tarr's other films, you know the answer.
Elsewhere the film uses the tropes of noir – high contrast lighting, men in coats, a crime, a moral dilemma, a prowling police inspector, cold urban spaces etc – but Tarr has flattened these signifiers and placed them within a world that is comprised of four clearly demarcated planes.
There's the domestic space (the home in which we eat/sleep/defecate), the space of entertainment or amusement (the bar, where our hero plays chess, gets drunk etc), the space of labour (the railroad and harbour) and beyond (the infinite ocean). The first 3 spaces sit next to the ocean. They teeter fearfully beside this limitless mass of black, always threatening to fall in. The ocean - thick, black and inky - is the final plane. A plane of murder and perhaps spiritual and physical death.
Indeed, water has such a strong impression on the inhabitants of this world that when Maloin sees his daughter sweeping water out of a shop - pushing back time - he immediately resolves to make her happy, forcing her to quit her job and buying her a fancy new coat. But of course it's no use. These are empty purchases, idyllic gestures which Maloin doesn't believe in anyway; he believes solely so that she may temporarily hope, the reverse of the characters in Tarr's "Damnation", who cut down the beliefs and hopes of others so that everyone might partake in a kind of communal misery. Significantly, when Maloin argues with his wife over the purchase, Tarr's instinct is to cut to the little girl mechanically eating a bowl of soup. Spoon after spoon she swallows...spoon...after...spoon...
8/10 – Tarr seems to be repeating himself here, and aesthetically the film's not as strong as his best work. For those who find the film ponderously slow, watch it at x2 speed. Worth two viewings.