The Man From London
Plot
The Man from London concerns a middle-aged railway pointsman, Maloin (Miroslav Krobot), who lives in a decrepit apartment in a port town with his highly-strung wife Camlia (Tilda Swinton) and his daughter Henriette (Erika Bk). One night while in his viewing tower at the port’s rail terminus, Maloin witnesses a fight on the dockside. One of the shady combatants is knocked into the water along with the briefcase he carries; when the other flees the dark quayside, Maloin makes a clandestine descent from the tower and retrieves the briefcase, which he finds full of sodden English banknotes. Maloin conceals the money and tells no-one of what he has seen. The next morning, he visits a tavern where he plays chess with the barkeep (Gyula Pauer). On his way home, he stops by the butcher’s where his daughter works, and finds to his indignance that they have her washing the floor. Later, from the window of his apartment, he notices Brown (Jnos Derzsi) watching him from below. At dinner, Maloin is increasingly irascible, addressing Henriette brusquely and arguing with Camlia. Meanwhile Brown searches the water at the dock’s edge without success before noticing the watchtower overlooking the quayside, and Maloin within.
Later at the tavern, a police inspector from London named Morrison (Istvn Lnrt) discusses with Brown the matter of the stolen money. Morrison claims to be working on behalf of a theatre owner named Mitchell, a theatre owner from whose office safe the 55,000 was stolen. Morrison proposes that Brown, being intimately familiar with Mitchell’s office, is the only man he knows that was capable of making away with the money without raising alarm. Morrison indicates that Mitchell cares only that the money is returned swiftly, and is even prepared to offer a two night’s theatre takings in exchange. When Morrison mentions having visited Brown’s wife and asks what he should tell Mitchell, Brown leaves the room under a pretense and slips out a side door. Nearby playing chess with the barkeep, Maloin has overheard the conversation.
Maloin calls to the butcher’s and drags Henriette from the store against her will and over the protestations of the butcher’s wife (Kati Lzr). He brings her to the tavern for a drink, where he overhears the barkeep telling another patron the story of Brown’s meeting with the inspector, revealing that Morrison had called the local police when Brown absconded. Though Henriette refuses her drink, Maloin buys her an expensive mink stole. They return home to the consternation of Camlia, who cannot comprehend why Maloin has ruined Henriette’s chances of a job and spent what little savings the family had on the extravagant stole. During Maloin’s shift the next night he is visited by Morrison, who questions him as to the previous night’s events as the body of the drowned man is retrieved from the quayside below.
The next day at the tavern, Morrison meets Brown’s wife (Agi Szirtes), and tells her that Brown is under suspicion for the theft and for the murder at the quayside. He asks for her help in finding him and repeats to her Mitchell’s offer to Brown, but she remains silent. At home, Henriette tells Maloin she found a man in their hut at the seaside, and in fear locked the door and ran home. An agitated Maloin tells her not to tell anyone, and leaves for the hut. He unlocks the door, and receiving no response to his calling Brown’s name, steps inside, closing the door behind. Minutes later he re-emerges, breathing heavily. After pausing to compose himself, he locks the door and leaves. In the next scene, Maloin presents the briefcase to Morrison in the tavern, and asks him to arrest him, confessing to having killed Brown an hour ago. Morrison leaves with Maloin for the hut, dismissing the frenzied inquiries of Brown’s wife about her husband and handing the briefcase to the barkeep on the way out. Brown’s wife follows the men to the hut, and emerges weeping with Brown moments later. Back at the tavern, Morrison prepares two envelopes with a small portion of the recovered money in each. One he leaves with the grieving widow to whom he apologises and wishes well, while the other he gives to Maloin, telling him that his case was one of self-defence. As he is preparing to leave, Morrison advises Maloin to go home and forget the whole affair. The camera focuses on the expressionless face of Brown’s wife momentarily before fading to white.
Production history
Background, initial attempt and obstacles
Director Bla Tarr and novelist-screenwriter Lszl Krasznahorkai had been collaborators since making the acclaimed epic Stntang in 1985. With The Man from London, they sought to adapt the 1934 French language novel L’Homme de Londres by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon. The ensemble cast of the film included Czech actor Miroslav Krobot, Briton Tilda Swinton, and Hungarian actors Jnos Derzsi and Istvn Lnrt. Tarr shared directorial credit with gnes Hranitzky the film’s editor and his long-time collaborator.
The development of the film was problematic, with threats to shut down the production, lack of financing, and ultimately a return to work. The project first faltered in February 2005, when the film’s producer Humbert Balsan committed suicide. Tarr reported receiving word of his producer’s death two days before shooting was scheduled to begin in Bastia, Corsica. Balsan’s death led to significant financial difficulties for the production. The film had been established as a co-production with French, German and Hungarian financing. Tarr’s Budapest-based production company T. T. Filmmhely were to provide the Hungarian funding for the project, while Balsan had secured the French and German financing for the film by warranting a loan from the French bank Coficin. Upon learning of his death, the bank withdrew its support for the production, which was then postponed.
After securing additional financing from Eurimages and ARTE, Tarr used these and the Hungarian funds to undertake nine days of shooting on sets he had built at a cost of 2 million. The French funding was cross-financed for the shoot by T. T. Filmmhely. As funds were frozen however, the Corsican subcontractor Tanit Films (controlled by the film’s then-executive producer Jean-Patrick Costantini), terminated their contract with Balsan and through legal action compelled the production to dismantle the sets and leave the shooting location. At that point, Ognon Pictures shut the production down and disassociated themselves from the film, and Tarr withdrew to Hungary to regroup.
Revisions and continued difficulties
So this is where we are at this moment. The agreement with Ognon and Coficin has been concluded, the signed contract has been submitted to the court in Paris and we shall soon start shooting the film which is now relieved from the burden of the past.
We sincerely hope that the descent to hell and the humiliation is over, finally we can switch off the light in the projection hall, and we can see what it was all about after all.
Because what is made ready from this shooting of half an hour or so is something that makes all of us burst with pride!
Press release by director Bla Tarr and producer Gbor Tni, February 6, 2006.
Expressions of sympathy and solidarity from the European film community manifested in renewed assurances of continued support from the production’s German partners, ARTE, and the French National Film Centre (whose support was conditional on the film having 51% of its dialogue in French). New French financing was secured from production company Mezzanine Film, and in Hungary, the Hungarian Motion Picture Foundation (MMKA) and the Minister of Culture pledged to back the production if a guarantee could be made that the film would be finished safely. A compromise filming schedule was negotiated whereby a quarter of the shoot would take place in Eastern Europe rather than Corsica and fewer shooting days would be allotted. This allowed the original 5 million budget to be reduced by 700,000 to the amount available. With the funding promises secured and a revised shooting schedule, the film’s producers forged a new co-production contract in July 2005.
While the production’s lawyers worked to clarify its legal standing in the Summer of 2005, it emerged that Humbert Balsan’s deeply indebted production company Ognon Pictures had pledged all rights to the production to Coficin in exchange for loans. With production in legal stasis and faced with a lengthy court battle to recover the rights, the producers agreed to a settlement with Ognon’s bankruptcy officer. In the meantime, the French partners Mezzanine Film declared their uncomfortableness with the scale of the production, and after mutual agreement with the producers, left the project on September 5, 2005. After meeting with the producers and their new French partner, Paul Saadoun of 13 Production, Coficin consented to completing the film. On February 6, 2006, Tarr and producer Gbor Tni issued a press release which documented at length the developments with the troubled production to that date, and expressed their hope and intent to persevere in completing the film. Tarr duly restarted shooting in March 2006, after a year of inactivity.
Release
The Man from London premiered in competition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, Tarr’s first film to do so. Although its showing was highly anticipated, the slow pace and prolonged shots of the film “had the press fleeing like panicked slaughterhouse cattle” as The New York Times put it, and it won no prize. This failure was attributed by the film’s French distributor Shellac to its late showing and the poor quality of the dubbing. A proposal for the film to open the Hungarian Film Week out of competition had previously been rejected by the festival’s board. Following its Cannes appearance, the film was re-dubbed in French and English and screened at the film festivals of Toronto, Melbourne, Edinburgh, Vancouver and New York. It proved controversial in New York, where elements of the audience reacted favourably when the film appeared to end prematurely due to a technical fault; others greeted the actual conclusion with fervent applause and calls of bravo. Global sales rights to the film were bought by Fortissimo Films. In the United Kingdom, distributor Artificial Eye released the film theatrically in December 2008, 18 months following its Cannes premiere. They later released a DVD box set of Tarr’s films which collected The Man from London with Damnation (1988) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). In the United States the film was given a limited release in May 2009 by IFC Films, who later made it available through video-on-demand.
Critical reception
Director Bla Tarr at the Sarajevo Film Festival showing of the film.
Critical reaction to The Man from London was to acknowledge its arresting formalist aesthetic, painstakingly composed scenes and glacial pace, and to lament the lack of an engaging plot or compelling characters. The critical consensus was that the film fell short of Tarr’s previous monumental efforts. Among Tarr’s mature films, Variety’s Derek Elley rated the film on a par with his Damnation (1988) but as inferior to the masterpieces Stntang (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), and remarked that it was improbable that The Man From London would put an end to the polarization of Tarr’s audiences into those who hail him as a director of “visionary genius” and those for whom he is a “crashing bore”.
The New York Times reviewer Nathan Lee described The Man from London as “bloated, formalist art”, and an “outrageously stylized, conceptually demanding film” that dehumanizes and alienates its audience. In The Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Honeycutt complimented the intricacy of the cinematography and the monochrome photography, but judged the film to be “tedious”, “repetitive” and “nearly unwatchable”. In a review of Cannes’ offerings for Time Out, Dave Calhoun too drew attention to the meticulous cinematography and signature shot length’s of Tarr’s “austere and mesmeric” film, and declared Swinton’s dubbing into Hungarian one of the festival’s strangest instances of cultural displacement. Reporting from Cannes, The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw described the film as “bizarre and lugubrious, but mesmeric”, and praised the muted performance of Agi Szirtes in the role of Brown’s wife as “strangely compelling”. Reviewing the film following its theatrical release, he found the dubbed dialogue affected and odd, the score doom-laden, the occasional humour mordant, and the cinematography mesmerising, remarking that net effect was “unsettling, sometimes absurd, sometimes stunning”. Ed Gonzales of The Village Voice concluded that the film “stands as an example of style for the sake of pure and intense but dispassionate style”.
References
^ a b c “The Man From London > Production Credits”. allmovie.com. All Media Guide. http://www.allmovie.com/work/the-man-from-london-398831/credits. Retrieved January 3, 2010.
^ a b c d e f g h i j k Tarr, Bla; Gbor Tni (February 8, 2006). “The Man from London”. Filmuni.hu. Magyar Filmuni. http://www.filmunio.hu/object.589B5E50-A770-4597-B517-72C51C9A9D57.ivy. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
^ a b c Elley, Derek (May 28, 2007). “The Man from London”. Variety (Reed Business Information). http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117933746.html. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
^ French, Philip (December 14, 2008). “The Man From London”. The Observer (Guardian Media Group). http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/dec/14/man-from-london-film-review. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
^ a b c d e f g Schwinke, Theodore (February 8, 2006). “Tarr to resume work on The Man From London”. Screen Daily. EMAP. http://filmunio.hu/object.bf7f1a33-d717-4d44-b468-2151550924bf.ivy. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
^ a b Romney, Jonathan (December 14, 2008). “The Man from London, Bela Tarr, 135 mins, 12A”. The Independent (Independent News & Media). http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/the-man-from-london-bela-tarr-135-mins-12a-1065627.html. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
^ a b c d e Dargis, Manohla; A.O. Scott (May 24, 2007). “Cannes: Odes to a beautiful France and austerity in Britain”. The New York Times (The New York Times Company). http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/arts/24iht-filmfest25.1.5850908.html. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
^ Gaydos, Steven; Katja Hofmann (March 20, 2005). “‘Man’ overboard in Corsica”. Variety (Reed Business Information). http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117919818.html. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
^ “Hungarian filmmaker continues shoot of troubled production”. Magyar Tvirati Iroda. Europe Intelligence Wire. March 20, 2006.
^ “Official Selection 2007”. festival-cannes.fr. Cannes Film Festival. http://www.festival-cannes.fr/en/archives/2007/inCompetition.html. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
^ Higgins, Charlotte (May 17, 2007). “Jury president Frears defends absence of British films”. The Guardian (Guardian Media Group). http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/may/17/world.film. Retrieved January 2, 2010.
^ a b “New Tarr Film in Wide Release in France”. Kultura.hu. Hungarian Ministry of Education and Culture. September 22, 2008. http://www.kultura.hu/main.php?folderID=1094&articleID=273498. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
^ Nadler, John (November 29, 2007). “Hungarian fest rejects Tarr pic”. Variety (Reed Business Information). http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117976708.html. Retrieved January 3, 2010.
^ Kelly, Brendan (June 26, 2007). “Elizabeth reigns in Toronto lineup”. Variety (Reed Business Information). http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=Cannes2007&jump=story&id=1061&articleid=VR1117967658. Retrieved September 29, 2009.
^ O’Neill, Phelim (August 11, 2007). “Edinburgh International Film Festival”. The Guardian (Guardian Media Group). http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2007/aug/11/edinburghfilmfestival2007.festivals. Retrieved September 29, 2009.
^ “Make a story real or why film it, director asks”. The Vancouver Sun (CanWest MediaWorks Publications). October 4, 2007. http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/westcoastlife/story.html?id=8829fb94-fad2-49c4-bbd9-8896d75318a3. Retrieved January 2, 2010.
^ Buening, Michael (October 15, 2007). “Spirited Away: The 45th Annual New York Film Festival Part Two”. PopMatters. PopMatters Media. http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/spirited-away-the-45th-annual-new-york-film-festival-part-two. Retrieved September 29, 2009.
^ Frater, Patrick (May 1, 2007). “Fortissimo makes plans for London”. Daily Variety (Reed Business Information).
^ Gibley, Ryan (December 5, 2008). “Slow-gestation films”. The Guardian (Guardian Media Group). http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/dec/05/slow-gestating-films. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
^ Sandhu, Sukhdev (July 28, 2009). “DVD review: Bla Tarr; Damnation, Werckmeister Harmonies, The Man From London”. telegraph.co.uk (Telegraph Media Group). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/dvd-reviews/5394790/DVD-review-Bela-Tarr-Damnation-Werckmeister-Harmonies-The-Man-From-London.html. Retrieved January 2, 2010.
^ Koehler, Robert (May 26, 2009). “A foreign-film fadeout”. The Christian Science Monitor (Church of Christ, Scientist). http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Movies/2009/0526/p17s01-almo.html/%28page%29/2. Retrieved January 2, 2010.
^ “The Man from London Movie Reviews, Pictures”. Rotten Tomatoes. IGN. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/10008257-man_from_london/. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
^ a b Lee, Nathan (September 22, 2008). “Slowly, Slowly in the Fog to Noir, via Simenon”. The New York Times (The New York Times Company). http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/movies/22man.html. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
^ Ide, Wendy (December 11, 2008). “The Man From London”. The Times (News Corporation). http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/film_reviews/article5320092.ece. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
^ Schneider, Dan (August 3, 2009). “The Man from London”. Alternative Film Guide. http://www.altfg.com/blog/reviews/the-man-from-london-bela-tarr/. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
^ Honeycutt, Kirk (May 24, 2007). “The Man From London”. The Hollywood Reporter (Nielsen Company). http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/film/reviews/article_display.jsp?&rid=9267. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
^ Calhoun, Dave (May 25, 2007). “Cannes round-up”. Time Out. http://www.timeout.com/film/news/1914/. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
^ Bradshaw, Peter (May 24, 2007). “Cannes roundup”. The Guardian (Guardian Media Group). http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/may/24/cannes2007.cannesfilmfestival2. Retrieved January 2, 2010.
^ Bradshaw, Peter (December 12, 2008). “The Man from London”. The Guardian (Guardian Media Group). http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/dec/12/the-man-from-london-review. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
^ Gonzalez, Ed (September 16, 2008). “Bla Tarr’s Magnificent Harmonies Gives Way to Anemic Noir in The Man From London”. The Village Voice (Village Voice Media). http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-09-17/film/b-eacute-la-tarr-s-magnificent-harmonies-gives-way-to-anemic-noir-in-the-man-from-london/. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
External links
The Man from London at the Internet Movie Database
The Man from London at Allmovie
The Man from London at the Cannes Film Festival
Trailer at Cineuropa.org
Interview with Tarr from May 23, 2007 at Cineuropa.org
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Films directed by Bla Tarr
Family Nest (1977) The Outsider (1981) The Prefab People (1982) Autumn Almanac (1985) Damnation (1988) Stntang (1994) Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) The Man from London (2007) The Turin Horse
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Categories: Hungarian films | French films | German films | 2000s crime films | 2000s drama films | 2007 films | Art films | Black and white films | Films based on Georges Simenon novels | Films based on mystery novels | Films directed by Bla Tarr | Film noir | Films shot in France | French drama films | Hungarian-language films | Police detective filmsHidden categories: Articles containing Hungarian language text
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