THE MAN FROM LONDON Review III
We then follow Maloin to his home, where Tarr offers some great scenes of him trying to sleep and dreaming of the prior night. We also see his protectiveness toward his daughter, Henriette (Erika Bok), and his arguments with his nameless wife (played by Swinton), who comes off as a typical harridan. All of these scenes, no matter how well filmed, feel tired and repetitive. By contrast, in Tarr’s earlier Satantango, Erika Bok plays a small girl who violently wrestles with and kills her cat. Despite the ugly nature of that sequence, it elucidates both Bok’s character and one of that film’s major plot points and themes. No such corresponding sequence exists in The Man from London.
Later on, we see the appearance of two Englishmen (Janos Derzsi and Istvan Lenart, both poorly dubbed), one of which ends up dead. Maloin’s confession to the killing makes no sense, nor does what happens to him afterwards. Worse yet, we are never sure if the dead Englishman was the man fighting with the first dead man at the beginning of the film, or merely an assistant to the other Englishman, an Inspector. Thus, we do not know if he was there to help solve or cover up the so-called ‘crime.’
The true sign of the film’s failure, however, is that none of this arouses any empathy or desire to make sense out of the goings-on. I found it impossible to care for any of the cardboard characters, even for the dead Englishman’s widow (Agi Szirtes), upon whose heartbroken face the film ends in a whiteout. Compare this to the characters in Tarr’s other films and the Man from London’s utter lack of complexity is stark.
As for the DVD, put out by Artificial Eye in Region 2, it is subpar when compared to the usual quality of their product. The DVD subtitles and dubbing, as mentioned before, are poor, while the package comes with very skimpy extras: a mediocre interview with Tarr, who lapses between English and Hungarian. There isn’t even a booklet or theatrical trailer, let alone a much-needed audio commentary. Even the DVD sleeve wrongly lists the film’s time at approximately 90 minutes — which is true if 130 minutes can be considered approximate.
Also irritating is scanning the reviews of the film and seeing so many critics caught cheating, yet again. I hate critical cribbing — the practice of not even engaging a work of art, but merely copying ideas or claims made by others and grafting them into one’s own work. The two most egregious examples of this that stick in my craw are the claims regarding character names that simply are not so in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup and Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad.
That practice shows why criticism has become outdated in most cultural contexts. In The Man from London, the most repeated error is one grafted from the film’s ad campaign: that there is a murder. Apparently, no critic has watched the scene of the fight on the pier, or recognized that there is no evidence of foul play in the Englishman’s death. So, why repeat these fallacies? My guess is that, as film critic Ray Carney has often noted, most of what passes for film criticism is merely a variant form of a film’s advertising campaign.
For its part, this ties back to the idea that The Man from London is all about style over substance. Indeed, there’s not much substance in this film, but had it been better executed — in terms of the mise en scène, the scoring, the screenplay (including the lack of poor self-plagiarism), etc. — the thin substance would have been a non-issue. Others have claimed that the plot ‘meanders,’ but this is no more or less true here than in any of Tarr’s other films. That claim has no qualitative bearing on why The Man from London fails where the others succeed, often brilliantly. Meandering, in fact, is not its sin, unconnectedness is.
And finally, calling a black-and-white film set mostly at night a film noir does not cover up the sins of its screenplay — especially when The Man from London is not a film noir, not even by Tarrian standards. Perhaps the (failed) attempt to make a film noir so perplexed Tarr that it is the main reason for the film’s flaws — but that is speculation, not criticism. Tarr is famously quoted in an interview as stating, ‘I believe that you keep making the same film throughout your whole life.’ The Man from London disproves that, unless one equates self-plagiarism with making the same film.
Yet, as disappointing as The Man from London is, it is not the total garbage that most Hollywood films throw into the culture. It is only a ‘relative’ failure, from an acknowledged master of the art form; therefore, it is still a good film, and one worth watching if only to use it as grounds for comparison to Tarr’s earlier — and better — films. Hopefully, Tarr will recognize this misstep and return to his better form in his next film. That’s one lesson Hollywood never seems to learn.
© Dan Schneider
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of Mr. Schneider, and they may not reflect the views of Alt Film Guide.
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Tags: Artificial Eye, Béla Tarr, DVDs, Erika Bok, Film Reviews, Mystery Movies, The Man from London, Tilda Swinton
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