"The Man From London"

A boat has just docked; two men on board are conspiring on the deck. One of them disembarks; from a nearby point on the dock, he signals to the other man on the deck, who throws a suitcase down to him. A little later, at a further point on the dock, the two men fight; one man pushes the holder of the suitcase into the water and flees. A third man has been observing all this. He goes down to the point at the dock where the suitcase-holding man drowned and fishes the suitcase out of the water. He brings it to a secure place and opens it. It is filled with wet banknotes.

In a standard thriller, all of this would most likely be told inside of five minutes, with a lot of exciting cuts to boot. But The Man From London is a Bela Tarr film. Hence, the above-described action takes place in three shots that total about half an hour.

Based on a novel by Georges Simenon (and endorsed by Simenon's son John in the production notes), The Man From London is not, in spite of its title and Tilda Swinton's prominent place in its cast, an English-language film. It is in Hungarian; Swinton speaks her dialogue in English and was dubbed by another actress. This creates a peculiar, international-productions-of-the-'60s effect in what is essentially another Tarr immersion into the black-and-white bleakness of Europe and, natch, man's condition. (And I imagine that this compromise was arrived at largely because these two great souls of contemporary cinema were just that keen to work with each other.) Those expecting something of a departure for Tarr (and they were certainly led to by the Cannes catalog description, which claims the movie has Hungarian and English dialogue, and was shot, gasp, in color) will be a bit let down. Those who luxuriate in Tarr's acutely conjured melancholia (and I am one of them) will swoon. As for the Cannes jury—the movie is in competition—I suspect they'll pass.

Comments

[Matt]

But The Man From London is a Bela Tarr film. Hence, the above-described action takes place in three shots that total about half an hour.

That's awesome.

[Aaron Aradillas]

But is it absorbing? Doing said action in three shots is impressive in and of itself, but does that stunt add anything to the experience other than one's ability to do it.

[Jonathan Rosenbaum]

The long takes in Tarr have a moral dimension because they have the effect of making the viewer complicitous in whatever happens to be going on. One French verb for attending or watching a play or a film, "assister à," seems especially relevant here: one "assists at" the onscreen action--something that wouldn't happen in the same way without the long takes. This also gives one plenty of time to think about and meditate on what's happening, which also changes the experience and what it means.

[Henri DuPont]

"Assister a" simply means "to be present for," as in "J'ai assiste au Festival de Cannes cette annee." Nothing to do with participating in something -- as Time magazine discovered when it translated Gerard Depardieu's account of witnessing a rape as a child as "I participated in a rape when I was a child." In any case, I can't see how watching a long take would make you any more or less morally complicitous in a film than watching a conventionally edited sequence -- probably less so if you want to revive Oudart's notion of the "suture" created by cross-cutting.

[Aaron Aradillas]

I down for what The Rosenbaumer has to say, but he still has some explaining to do for choosing Dante's Small Soldiers over Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan.

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