over his head
by Douglas Messerli
Béla
Tarr and László Krasznahorkai (based on the novel by George Simenon,
screenplay), Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky (directors) A Londoni férfi (The Man
from London) / 2007, USA 2008, 2009
One is tempted to include Béla Tarr's
masterful The Man from London in a
discussion of films such as those I have gathered under the rubric "Crime
Pays," for at film's end the London inspector awards both the wife of the
thief-murderer Brown (Ági Szites) and the opportunist-thief and murderer Maloin
(Miroslav Krobot) a monetary award. But, as usual, Tarr turns any generic
relationships with other films on its head, creating an original work that
cannot quite be compared with others. In the majority of the "Crime
Pays" genre, although the heroes may feel an occasional pang of guilt,
their "getting away with murder" is a thing of pleasure, a joyful
overturning of an already corrupt system. The heroes of these works are
generally masterful crooks—or at least comically bumbling ones—whose careful
and crafty maneuvers give us more pleasure than the authoritarian attempts to
check their actions. We side with the crooks, and the fact that they come away
unscathed demonstrates just how little they (and we) disrespect what is usually
an equally corrupt moral code.
In The
Man from London, however, Tarr permits us very little joy in Maolin's dark
and brooding gestures. From his position high above land and sea, working as a
railway pointsman, the middle-aged worker moves with a Frankensteinian plod in
a kind of zombie-like voyeurism, watching through the various viewpoints
available to him incidents on ship, land, and water, ponderously evaluating
their meaning and, ultimately, taking advantage of the situation at hand.
A ship has docked, and in a drawn-out sequence of visual repetitions,
Tarr ponderously forces us to observe, for long periods, what seems to be
inaction. Yet the slow pace is purposeful in demonstrating not only the
intensity of Maloin's voyeurism, which we are sharing, but signifies the
meaningless boredom of that worker's nightly life, a man working alone, whose
only major act is, once it has filled up with the ship's passengers, to set the
train upon its designated track. Nothing much else happens, but what does occur
is obviously an enormity of activity compared to the uneventful emptiness
Maloin must endure night after night.
Two Englishman can be heard talking, one evidently (since we hear only
fragments of their conversation) warning the other of consequences. Slowly one
of the men exits the ship, showing his papers and, instead of moving, as most
of the others, into the awaiting train, walks forward along the edge of the
dock. Eventually we see him standing a ways from the hull of the ship, where
suddenly a brief case is tossed from ship to shore, with him retrieving it.
With briefcase in hand, he walks along the quay, disappearing into the fog. A
few minutes later, however, we see two men wrestling at the edge of the quay,
shouting at one another, fighting evidently over the contents of the same
briefcase. One man is thrown into the ocean along with his briefcase. The other
hurries away to a nearby cafe.
Tarr
almost hides the fact that what we have been observing for nearly the first
half-hour of this film, is also being observed by the pointsmen. We hear his
footsteps, see bars of black and white as he moves sideways along the window
patterns, but know little else about his existence. It is only now that he comes
into being. With a long tow-hook in hand, Maolin slowly descends from his
sanctuary, moving to the edge of the quay, and, with the help of the incoming
tide, eventually retrieves the briefcase. Inside, as we discover once he has
returned to his aerie, are stacks of British pounds, 55,000 we later discover.
One by one, the methodical worker sets them upon the stove to dry.
So begins
the downfall of an everyday, hard working man, living in a decrepit apartment
in this port town (originally filmed in Corsica before having to move the film
company elsewhere). Maolin has no easy life. At daylight he slowly trudges back
home, discovering along the way that his daughter, working as a clerk in a
nearby butcher shop, has now been forced to clean the floors backing the
alleyway. She is no beauty, and it is not an impossibly difficult job, yet he
is outraged; for him, clearly, it is yet another insult in a life of small
abuses, abuses which he, in turn, transfers to both daughter and his
hard-working, loyal wife (Tilda Swinton, in the version of the film I saw,
dubbed into French). His absurd logic is expressed in a chauvinist
proclamation: everyone can see her ass. And a few days later he acts on his
ridiculous perceptions, forcing his daughter, Henriette (Erika Bók) to leave
her employment without notice.
In what might almost be seen as a kind of incestuous pride, he takes her
to the cafe for a drink and, on the way home, using some of his personal
savings, buys her a fur stole. The purchase is a ridiculous one, the thin role
of fur looking quite absurd around the neck of the horse-faced Henriette, but
the act obviously helps to salve the years of silent abuse he has endured. His
wife, quite understandably, insists he has lost his mind, that he is mad! But
after all the abuses she hurls at him, it is clear in Swinton's silent facial
frieze—a gesture only Tarr's patient (some describe it as "glacial")
camera could capture—that her anger arises not only out of the foolishness of
the act but a deep envy, a feeling of neglect for the years of cooking and
serving and saving she has had to suffer.
At the heart of Maolin's anger and meaningless acts, we realize, is his
growing sense of guilt, a feeling—reinforced by being trailed by one of the thieves,
Brown—that he has gotten in over his head. Maolin may not yet understand the
consequence of his acts, but he senses something amiss, suddenly, in his life.
He has money that he dare not and, because it is in British pounds, cannot expend. The appearance of
Inspector Morrison (István Lénárt), the man from London, further unsettles him.
Having tracked down Brown, Morrison lays out his cards, explaining why they
suspect him and offering him his freedom and two weekends of theater sales if
he returns the money. Brown's answer is to slip from Morrison's watch, escaping
into a world of hunger as he goes on the lam.
Morrison's next step is to bring in Mrs. Brown, painfully explaining to
her the situation, and encouraging her to play along as he concocts a story of
her son's illness, hoping to lure Brown back to her and into his net. Szirtes
tearful reaction to Morrison's revelations are one of the emotional highlights
of this dark tale in which feelings are otherwise mostly hidden and bottled up.
Overhearing much of these cafe conversations, Maolin is increasingly
made uneasy, so much so that when the clever inspector pays him a visit at the
train-tower, he is clearly ill at ease, setting a pot of hot water upon the
burner where he had previously dried out the bills in order to steam the
windows over as if to hide the view from which he has observed the crimes. The
discovery of the body of Brown's cohort, however, can only further hint that
there was something to be observed.
In a sudden twist of the plot, Henriette reveals to him, back in their
apartment, that a man has entered their oceanside storage hut; she has locked
him in. Gathering a few provisions, wine, bread, etc., Maolin slowly trudges
off to the hut, opening the lock and entering. Again Tarr does the unexpected.
For several long minutes we hear little and see nothing. What is going on
inside is left to our imaginations.
When
Maolin exits, he is short of breath. In the very next scene he appears before
Morrison, the briefcase in hand, admitting to Brown's murder. Ordering the cafe
owner to keep Mrs. Brown there, he and Maolin return to the hut, Brown's wife
disobediently following.
The film ends, as I have
suggested, with both Brown's wife's and Maolin's rewards, along with his being
given a clean slate. Neither openly accepts the money, as Morrison slips the
bills into her purse and into his pocket. Both their faces remain blank as they
stare off into a future that cannot free them from their own falls from grace.
Tarr's study of the moral breakdown of order and society, along with the
individual's involvement in that collapse cannot exactly be described as
subtle, but, in its long visual manifestations of the turmoil of the inner soul
suffering in such a world, is certainly powerful and cerebrally moving. That
the film, time and again, was waylaid by individuals and corporations seemingly
determined to see that it would never be shot, still evokes such a powerful
message is almost a miracle. And if it is not quite up to the cinematic levels
obtained by the director's Sátántango and
Werckmesiter Harmonies, it only reiterates how brilliant Tarr
is as a filmmaker.
Los
Angeles, April 24, 2012