Movie Review

THE MAN FROM LONDON

 

Published: September 22, 2008
by: Nathan Lee

Now on the view in the contemporary galleries of the Museum of Modern Art are a number of striking works in black and white. A suite of photographs by Lewis Baltz studies the textures of dilapidated tract housing. Gerhard Richter’s oil painting “Cityscape” is an abstracted aerial view done in gestural brushstrokes. A video projection by Yvonne Rainer contemplates a solo dance performance.

Another contemporary art work in black and white, closely related in style and technique to these three, can be seen in a basement space of MoMA: “The Man From London” by Bela Tarr.

Technically “The Man From London” is properly described as the new movie by an internationally acclaimed filmmaker that is receiving its United States theatrical engagement at MoMA. But so conventional a description will ill prepare most viewers for this outrageously stylized, conceptually demanding film.

Based on a novel by Georges Simenon, “The Man From London” is a kind of slow-motion film noir about a railway worker (Miroslav Krobot as Maloin) who stumbles over a suitcase stuffed with money. But this is true only in the sense that a cubist still life is “about” a mandolin. The movie is really about a manner of looking at things, exploring space in unexpected ways, meditating on qualities of light and the surface of objects. 

It’s as an object that “The Man From London” is best approached. Take the opening scene: the mysterious passing of a suitcase between cloak-and-dagger types on a fog-shrouded waterfront. Most directors, getting their story under way, would take a minute or so to establish this information and set a tone. Mr. Tarr distends his slight narrative sequence into an elaborate, lugubrious arabesque of expanding and collapsing perspectives, drifting, in a single shot, from a close-up detail of human interactions to the languid contemplation of a ship’s hull, out to a macroview of the entire tableau before moving in (slowly, slowly) to frame another exquisitely choreographed gesture. And then back out. Repeat. For 10 minutes. 

As for those “human interactions,” I mean them strictly in the most dispassionate sense, nothing that would imply emotion, credible characters or engaging drama. Mr. Tarr lavishes tremendous visual energy on Maloin, his inscrutable protagonist, but hasn’t so much as lifted a pinky to make us care about his melancholy quandary. In those rare moments when the script calls for an eruption of feeling (as when Maloin argues with his wife, played by a zombified Tilda Swinton), Mr. Tarr simply treats it, in his complicated way, as just another motif. 

This dehumanizing isn’t helped much by the print being shown at MoMA, in which the actors, speaking Hungarian for the most part, have all been dubbed into French, with English subtitles. On the other hand, this linguistic distraction does contribute to the over-all alienation. Mr. Tarr’s chilly tour de force is to be understood as art all right. Bloated, formalist art.