The Man from London
The Man from London | |
---|---|
Mihály Vig[2] | |
Production companies | |
Distributed by | Fortissimo Films Artificial Eye IFC Films |
Release date |
|
Running time | 139 minutes |
Countries | Hungary France Germany |
Languages | English French |
Budget | €4.3 million[3] |
The Man from London (
The French, German and Hungarian co-production of the film was fraught with difficulty and obstacles. The first of these was the suicide of the film's French producer, Humbert Balsan in February 2005, days before shooting was due to begin. As the original financing of the film collapsed, the remaining producers managed to secure stop-gap funding which allowed them to shoot nine days of footage on the expensive Corsican sets, until they were shut down through legal action by the local subcontractor. After many expressions of support from European film organisations, production companies and government bodies, a new co-production contract was signed in July 2005 with a revised budget and shooting schedule. It then emerged that all rights to the film had been ceded to a French bank under the original production agreement, and only after further changes in the film's backers was a deal struck with the bank to allow shooting to resume in March 2006, over a year later than had been originally envisaged.
The Man from London was the first of Tarr's films to premiere in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, but despite being highly anticipated, it won no prize. The French distributor blamed this on poor dubbing and a late showing, though the press was put off by the film's extended shots and leaden pace. After being re-dubbed, it was shown on the international film festival circuit.
Critical reception to The Man from London was generally positive, though less adamant than that of the director's previous two works; while reviewers spoke in glowing terms of the formidable cinematography and meticulous composition, they felt the film lacked compelling characters. Variety reviewer Derek Elley commented that the film was unlikely to reconcile the division between viewers of Tarr's films who find the director to be "either a visionary genius or a crashing bore".[4]
Plot
The film concerns a middle-aged railway
Later at the tavern, a police inspector from London named Morrison (
Maloin calls to the butcher's and drags Henriette from the store against her will and over the protestations of the butcher's wife (
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 Morrison 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 apologizes and wishes well, while the other he gives to Maloin, telling him that his case was one of self-defense. 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.
Cast
- Miroslav Krobot as Maloin
- Tilda Swinton as Maloin's wife
- Erika Bók as Henriette
- János Derzsi as Brown
Analysis
According to critic Martha P. Nochimson, the film is an exploration of the place of anonymous breakdowns of social order in personal life. For the most part, questions of justice operate in the background of The Man From London, which foregrounds the perceptions and point of view of an accidental witness to the murder, who, like the viewer, has no connection with anyone involved. The film principally concerns the texture of the world of the protagonist Maloin as he experiences it first hand: fog, light, shadow, skin, walls, floors, windows, sounds. These are much closer to Maloin than any broken laws involving strangers as in the killing at the dock. As distinct from the trope of crime functioning as a break from the boredom of the mundane for the Hitchcockian ordinary man "excitingly" caught up in it, the interjection of crime in the lives of the characters of The Man from London is a phantom occurrence for those burrowed into the center of the mundane details of their lives. In other words, Tarr's film suggests the possibility that it is only on an abstract plane that murder committed by and on strangers causes a stir and demands an investigation. In this context, it is fitting that the investigation must be undertaken by a stranger, the man from London, since abstraction entails distancing from an enveloping context. Only the appearance of the man from London, Brown, impels Maloin to struggle with his de facto alienation, as an ordinary man, from moral principle, an alienation linked, counterintuitively, to the absence of desire in his daily grind.[5]
Background
Director Béla Tarr and novelist-screenwriter
Production history
The development of the film was problematic, with threats to shut down the production, lack of financing, and ultimately a return to work.[13] The project first faltered in February 2005, when the film's producer Humbert Balsan committed suicide.[13] Tarr reported receiving word of his producer's death two days before shooting was scheduled to begin in Bastia, Corsica.[11] Balsan's death led to significant financial difficulties for the production.[13] The film had been established as a co-production with French, German and Hungarian financing.[3] Tarr's Budapest-based production company T. T. Filmműhely 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 Coficiné.[3] Upon learning of his death, the bank withdrew its support for the production,[11] which was then postponed.[3]
So this is where we are at this moment. The agreement with Ognon and Coficiné 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 Béla Tarr and producer Gábor Téni, February 6, 2006.[3]
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. Filmműhely. As funds were frozen however, the Corsican subcontractor Tanit Films (controlled by the film's then-executive producer Jean-Patrick Costantini),[14] 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,[3] and Tarr withdrew to Hungary to regroup.[11]
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
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 Coficiné 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.[3] In the meantime, the French partners Mezzanine Film declared their discomfort 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, Coficiné consented to completing the film.[3][11] On February 6, 2006, Tarr and producer Gábor Téni 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.[3] Tarr duly restarted shooting in March 2006, after a year of inactivity.[11][15] The filmmakers dedicated The Man from London to their late colleague Humbert Balsan.[16]
Release
The Man from London premiered in competition at the
Global sales rights to the film were bought by
Critical reception
Critical reaction to The Man from London generally praised its formalist aesthetic and painstakingly composed scenes, while criticizing its slow pace and lack of a compelling plot.[31][32] Most argued the film fell short of Tarr's previous efforts.[4][12][33][34] Variety's Derek Elley rated the film on a par with his Damnation (1988) but as inferior to Sátántangó (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), remarking 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".[4] Martin Tsai of The New York Sun allowed that Tarr "makes it easy for viewers to get lost in his beautifully bleak world and lose track of time" but complained that in comparison with its predecessors, the film's central theme of guilt seemed insubstantial and the film itself felt "slight and incomplete".[35]
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".[39] 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".[40] Ed Gonzalez of The Village Voice concluded that the film "stands as an example of style for the sake of pure and intense but dispassionate style".[41]
References
- ^ "The Man from London (2007) - IMDb". IMDb.
- ^ allmovie.com. All Media Guide. Retrieved January 3, 2010.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Tarr, Béla; Gábor Téni (February 8, 2006). "The Man from London". Filmunió.hu. Magyar Filmunió. Archived from the original on February 25, 2008. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
- ^ a b c Elley, Derek (May 28, 2007). "The Man from London". Variety. Reed Business Information. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
- ISSN 1466-4615. Retrieved December 8, 2010.
- ^ French, Philip (December 14, 2008). "The Man from London". The Observer. Guardian Media Group. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
- ^ a b Bori, Erzsébet (Spring 2008). "From a Tower, Darkly". The Hungarian Quarterly. XLIX (189). Retrieved August 20, 2010.
- ISSN 0037-4806. Archived from the originalon December 19, 2008. Retrieved October 12, 2010.
- ^ a b Bálint Kovács, András (February 2008). "The World According to Béla Tarr". Kinokultura (Special Issue 7: Hungarian Cinema). Retrieved August 20, 2010.
- ^ "In Competition: The Man from London by Béla Tarr". festival-cannes.fr. Cannes Film Festival. 23 May 2007. Retrieved August 20, 2010.
- ^ Screen Daily. EMAP. Archived from the originalon October 30, 2006. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
- ^ a b Romney, Jonathan (December 14, 2008). "The Man from London, Béla Tarr, 135 mins, 12A". The Independent. Independent News & Media. Archived from the original on January 18, 2009. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
- ^ A.O. Scott (May 24, 2007). "Cannes: Odes to a beautiful France and austerity in Britain". The New York Times. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
- ^ Gaydos, Steven; Katja Hofmann (March 20, 2005). "'Man' overboard in Corsica". Variety. Reed Business Information. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
- ^ "Hungarian filmmaker continues shoot of troubled production". Europe Intelligence Wire. Magyar Távirati Iroda. March 20, 2006.
- ^ "Press Conference: The Man from London". festival-cannes.fr. Cannes Film Festival. 23 May 2007. Retrieved August 20, 2010.
- ^ "Official Selection 2007". festival-cannes.fr. Cannes Film Festival. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
- ^ Higgins, Charlotte (May 17, 2007). "Jury president Frears defends absence of British films". The Guardian. 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. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
- ^ Nadler, John (November 29, 2007). "Hungarian fest rejects Tarr pic". Variety. Reed Business Information. Retrieved January 3, 2010.
- ^ Kelly, Brendan (June 26, 2007). "Elizabeth reigns in Toronto lineup". Variety. Reed Business Information. Archived from the original on July 2, 2007. Retrieved September 29, 2009.
- ^ O'Neill, Phelim (August 11, 2007). "Edinburgh International Film Festival". The Guardian. Retrieved September 29, 2009.
- The Vancouver Sun. CanWest MediaWorks Publications. October 4, 2007. Retrieved January 2, 2010.
- ^ "Competition Features". splitfilmfestival.hr. Split Film Festival. Retrieved August 19, 2010.
- ^ Buening, Michael (October 15, 2007). "Spirited Away: The 45th Annual New York Film Festival – Part Two". PopMatters. PopMatters Media. Retrieved September 29, 2009.
- Daily Variety. Reed Business Information.
- ^ "MoMA Presents: Béla Tarr's The Man from London". moma.org. MoMa. Retrieved August 20, 2010.
- ^ Gibley, Ryan (December 5, 2008). "Slow-gestation films". The Guardian. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
- telegraph.co.uk. Telegraph Media Group. Retrieved January 2, 2010.
- ^ Koehler, Robert (May 26, 2009). "A foreign-film fadeout". The Christian Science Monitor. Church of Christ, Scientist. Retrieved January 2, 2010.
- ^ "The Man from London Movie Reviews, Pictures". Rotten Tomatoes. IGN. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
- ^ a b Lee, Nathan (September 22, 2008). "Slowly, Slowly in the Fog to Noir, via Simenon". The New York Times. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
- ^ Ide, Wendy (December 11, 2008). "The Man from London". The Times. News Corporation. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
- ^ Schneider, Dan (August 3, 2009). "The Man from London". Alternative Film Guide. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
- ^ Tsai, Martin (September 25, 2008). "MoMA Snatches Two From the Art House". The New York Sun. ONE SL. Retrieved October 12, 2010.
- ^ Reichert, Jeff (September 16, 2008). "The Man from London: Weight and Sea". Reverse Shot. Retrieved June 3, 2017.
- ^ Honeycutt, Kirk (May 24, 2007). "The Man from London". The Hollywood Reporter. Nielsen Company. Archived from the original on June 5, 2008. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
- Time Out. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
- ^ Bradshaw, Peter (May 24, 2007). "Cannes roundup". The Guardian. Retrieved January 2, 2010.
- ^ Bradshaw, Peter (December 12, 2008). "The Man from London". The Guardian. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
- ^ Gonzalez, Ed (September 16, 2008). "Béla Tarr's Magnificent Harmonies Gives Way to Anemic Noir in The Man from London". The Village Voice. Village Voice Media. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
External links
- The Man from London at IMDb
- The Man from London at Rotten Tomatoes
- 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