I'm going to post a few of my favorite reviews from my film blog, Director, Please! http://directorplease.me Hope no one minds.
The Man From London
Directed by Béla Tarr
(France/Germany/Hungary, 2007)
If you’re the sort of person who breezes past photographs or paintings in a gallery or museum, thinking you can appreciate them in a couple of seconds, then The Man From London will probably put you to sleep. If, however, you’re the sort who contemplates, absorbs, allows meaning to unfold in its own sweet time as you look, then director Béla Tarr’s masterpiece will probably mesmerize you.
Believe it or not, this is the first Tarr film I’ve ever seen. I’ve pirated a couple of them off the Interwebs, and tried watching them on my MacBook. A few minutes of each was all I needed to realize that there’s no way his films can be appreciated off the big screen. The awful, muddy, pixellated black tones of a typical .avi file put me off enough to make me hit stop. I don’t mind watching a crappy copy of some piece of garbage like Indiana Jones, which I couldn’t even finish I was so bored, but if I’m anticipating getting something more from a film, why choose digital? So I’ve been waiting to be able to watch one in a real theater, on real celluloid, on a grand screen, in the complete dark, as any movie worth remembering should be seen. In his capsule review, Jonathan Rosenbaum calls the black & white cinematography “ravishing,” and that’s how I felt: Ravished, rapt, enlivened, especially after the disappointing lineup of my first day. [I saw this at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic.]
In this film, Tarr adapts a murder/mystery/thriller written by Georges Simenon, creating a minimalist film noir stripped of its thrills and instead saturated with mystery and portent. The slow, slow camera movements heighten the sense that these scenes we’re watching have always been there, will always be there, and that something important is waiting for us to discover it while we look. Indeed, some shots – the close-ups of the women, (Tilda Swinton playing one, giving a strange, detailed and uncharacteristic peformance), the shots from behind of a stolid Moloin, the main character who witnesses a murder and benefits from it – achieve the monumentality and permanence of statues. In one scene, the camera watches Mouloin from behind, as he’s interrogated by an English policeman. He’s motionless; his shoulders look set in stone, and the top of his head like the dome of a rock. The camera wavers ever-so slightly, intensifying Moloin’s resistance, not just to the investigator’s questions, but to Moloin’s sense that life itself, after making him watch something terrible, is now trying to take the only thing to come of it away from him. In two significant shots, slow zooms into the faces of the two main women characters – and I do mean slow – imply that the suffering and confusion of these women will go on forever. These are powerful shots, creating emotional impact and meaning from a commanding synthesis and control of the materials of filmmaking. Really, I didn’t see any film at the fest whose director can even come close to the mastery of Tarr. Hyperbole? I won’t know until I see it again, but for now, I can’t say it any other way.