From Satantango, Tarr does the almost inverse of what he did with the Damnation sequence, taking several great scenes of people at a bar, and invoking a similar scene in a pool hall in The Man from London. But unlike a similar single scene in Werckmeister Harmonies, which illuminates the lead character’s inner self, the sequence in The Man from London plays as a sort of grotesque bit, tossed in just for shock value.
In Satantango, the bar scenes play out much longer; one scene, in particular, is shown from two different perspectives at two different points in the film. This causes a parallax that is absent in the pool hall scene, which also fails to highlight anything about the main character. (The grotesques are walk-ons, and not the intimately sketched characters of Satantango.) Again, Tarr is just going through the motions.
Finally, from Werckmeister Harmonies we get The Man from London’s opening scene, which tracks up from the water in the harbor overseen by Maloin, and onto the docked ship the film's titular character may be aboard. The score and the almost fetishistic lingering of the camera recall the scene in the earlier film where its lead character is cosmically stirred by peering into the eye of a dead whale. But as with the bit stolen from Damnation, the sequence in The Man from London is also misplaced.
The reason the whale eye in Werckmeister Harmonies is so moving is a) it is well scored, and b) we know the character, identify with him as an everyman, and can sense the import the moment will bring to him (and to us). By contrast, the scene in The Man from London opens the film, appearing before any human characters are introduced. As a result, it lacks the aforementioned point "b," while he newer film's score is much more harsh and overdone. We, the audience, are supposed to be impressed with the ship and the cinematography, but it just plays out as Tarr blowing his own horn in a fanfare for something that does not follow later on in the film.
And this touches upon another major flaw in The Man from London: the scoring by Mihály Vig. Vig’s compositions in his preceding film with Tarr, Werckmeister Harmonies, was both sublime and sparely used. But from its opening scene, with the camera slowly trolling up the docked ship, the music in The Man from London is as heavyhanded as one of Philip Glass' bad scores — especially use of the accordion, which, while leaden and enervating, was so much more energizing in Satantango. On the other hand, Fred Kelemen's camera work is sublime, and has been rightly praised in most critical takes on the film. It’s the only real positive found in The Man from London — though a monumentally great one.
Now, before I hit on the poor screenplay, I must mention another of The Man from London's failures — its dubbing. The film is presumably set in France, since the bulk of the characters speak French with a bit of some other European languages tossed in, including English. But then there's the use of British actress Tilda Swinton, as Maloin’s wife, whose voice is dubbed into French, while the use of Central and Eastern European actors dubbed into French and English is just annoying. (Even more annoying is that many critics do not seem to realize that French is being spoken in the film, often claiming certain actors clearly speaking French are speaking Hungarian!)
Now, usually I do not mind even poor dubbing as I find it far preferable to even good subtitling, but here the viewer gets the worst of both. We get poor dubbing and poor subtitling, as much is left untranslated and what is translated is in white font, often difficult to make out as it blanches against the screen. This is unacceptable, and shows Tarr's real contempt for the viewer, as well as laziness on his part.
In cases like this you either get your actors to learn their roles phonetically (as he did in the far better dubbed Werckmeister Harmonies), then subtitle them (after all, none of the characters has many lines, especially Swinton, in a de facto cameo), or you bite the bullet on realism, hire all actors who can speak one language, and just ‘pretend,’ as they did in ye olden, golden days of film. In short, the aural elements of The Man from London — the speaking roles and scoring — are an utter disaster!
The screenplay is little better. Adapting a novel by Georges Simenon, Tarr and his pal, László Krasznahorkai, have created a screenplay of jagged fragments that never cohere into a whole. It's not that the plot is confusing — as many critics claim of films they do not understand; it's merely simplistic and unbelievable. The filmmakers and the film's ad campaign have tried to make The Man from London into a film noir revolving around a murder and a cover-up. Yet, that's not what the film is about.
The Man from London follows Maloin, the night watchman at a local harbor and rail yard, after he witnesses some subterfuge on a boat, followed by fisticuffs on a pier, in which one of the two combatants falls off into the water. As shown on camera, the supposed death is clearly not murder, but an accident or an act of self-defense. Maloin later goes to the pier and retrieves a suitcase full of money. Now, it’s strongly implied that this is related to the docked ship where some sort of illegal transactions are transpiring.