This film has many extraordinarily interesting qualities, but they are all ruined by the apparent vanity of the director, who appears to be a kind of inverted snob (I watched the interview of him on the DVD). The first shot of the film lasts about five minutes, maybe more, and is interminably boring, moving at slower than a snail's pace. But the director, a Hungarian named Bela Tarr, is determined that we must watch it, perhaps on the theory that anyone lacking the patience to do so is one of the unworthy ones, and does not deserve to see the rest of what he considers his masterpiece. The film defies all normal expectations of a viewing public and does not appear to be made for audiences at all, but rather an example of the director making something to please himself and his two or three best friends. The film is in black and white, and the cinematography is spectacularly good. Tarr gives the impression that he wishes to evoke the same moods as the famous night photos of Paris by Brassai. The film is based upon a novel by Georges Simenon, and the dialogue is in a mixture of French and English, with no Hungarian spoken, as all the Hungarian actors are dubbed in either French or English. It is supposedly set in a French port which has a ferry whose passengers disembark onto a waiting train. We often see them doing this at night, heads bowed, like passengers entering the Afterlife, carrying small valises to last them for Eternity. The film is based so entirely upon images that, if not for its sluggishness, it would qualify as Imagiste in the tradition of Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle ('H.D.'). In his interview, the Director says it is not necessary to hear the dialogue or read the subtitles, as the images speak for themselves. Tarr appears to be inspired by the films of Carl Dreyer, and wishes to sear our sight with ravaged faces, upon which the camera lingers for whole minutes, in the hope that souls will emerge from the eyes and the skin, with the characters' inner depths spilling out like guts on the battlefield. Long, sombre shots where nothing happens are suddenly interspersed with explosions of intense and violent human emotions. Characters who had seemed dead have their electricity turned on and suddenly start shouting and gesticulating. In this melée the chamaeleon-like Tilda Swinton (who is always likely to turn up in the most bizarre settings, and the stranger it is, the more certain we can be that she will be there) has a cameo part, which may have required one or two days's shooting time (or should I say weeks, at Tarr's pace?) Once again, she startles us with her brilliance. Making good use of her fluent French, she plays a desperate, shrieking, terrified harridan of a wife to a man who never speaks and has no money, played by a taciturn Miroslav Krobot, with knitted brow and lips stuck together with glue. The weird music by Mihaly Vig is hauntingly effective, drawing upon its sheer monotony to create a captivating and eerie atmosphere which matches the film to perfection. A girl named Erika Bok plays the daughter of Swinton and Krobot, and is utterly fascinating in her slack-jawed ugliness and simulated stupidity, so that one cannot take one's eyes off her. All of the characters are like figures from a dream, none seems real. Surely these are the people who come to haunt one at night when one has had too much fois gras and sauterne. Can people like Tilda Swinton even exist? I have in other reviews pointed out that she is an extraterrestrial at least, if not someone from another dimension. As for Erika Bok, she cannot possibly exist, she has to be invented. The ultra-weird Istvan Lenart, speaking with the dubbed voice of Edward Fox sounding like a séance-voice of a disembodied spirit reciting the Creed at a black mass, or a corpse enunciating its views from its crypt, outdoes even Swinton in non-human appearance, in the competition to appear unreal and trans-human. He has more folds and wrinkles to his face than a rhinoceros, and has the eyes of a dead man who has lain in his grave for at least twenty years without rotting down properly. This film is like a film full of nocturnal zombies, but the film itself is also like a zombie, since it is clearly just as asleep as a ward full of sedated patients in a lunatic asylum, who have all just had electric shock treatment and forgotten who they are before passing out of consciousness. If Tarr were not so vain, and had been willing to make this film watchable, it could have been an astounding classic. But he is even more irritating than the French director Jacques Rivette, whose 'La Belle Noiseuse' (1991) I had previously believed to be the Number One Most Boring and Interminable Film of All Time. Why does Tarr want to bore us to death and drive us away? Because he is 'above' such things as audiences and viewers? If so, we are so far beneath him that we truly do not deserve him. He should be making films for jungle sloths. What a terrible waste, that a man with such talent should be so perverse in refusing to make 'compromises' that he forgets that films are meant to be seen by people, and not to be kept at home in a locked drawer. 'Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!'
Review of The Man from London
