Jornal da Mostra

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THE MAN FROM LONDON

NEW BÉLA TARR’S FILM, INSPIRED IN SIMENON,TALKS ABOUT RUPTURE AND COMPLICITY

Maloin is a character with no perspectives in his life. He witnesses a death crime in the scenery of a decaying harbor and, unexpectedly, must face the consequences of morality, crime and punishment. This is a simplifying summary of the new film by Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, THE MAN FROM LONDON, which takes us on a fascinating spiral through the tortuous mechanisms of minds tormented by guilt feelings.

This Hungary, Germany and France production, in a rare and dense black and white, results in the new existentialist film by Hungarian master Béla Tarr, inspired by the novel by Georges Simenon L’HOMME DE LONDRES. The film was finished after almost three very deranged years and was presented at the competitive selection at the 60th Cannes Festival. After investing in the building of a millionaire special set in Corsica, simulating a railway terminal at a harbor, which cost two million euros, Béla Tarr was surprised two days before the beginning of filming by the suicide of his French producer Hubert Balsan. A new battle then started for the filmmaker to liberate the frozen funds at the Coficine bank and the re-grouping of other partners involved in his beautiful project: Eurimages, Hungarian Founds. and ARTE.

While Béla Tarr remade his budget to make it more economic, the international federation of film critics spread an appeal trying to help the project, that said: “Béla Tarr tries to go back to shooting without a producer and under devastating and humiliating conditions”.

John Simenon, the son of the Belgian writer, supported the film with the following statement: “With or without (inspector) Maigret, my father’s novels have always invited us to follow the life of a man or a woman who is particularly like ours in its drama and towards an unstoppable fate… what Béla Tarr is trying to do in his film, besides the unbelievable difficulties he faces, is a brilliant exercise in style that deeply touched me.”

This is the main issue in Béla Tarr’s films – the exercise in style, with elliptic caprices in the narration and in the hypnotic camera movements, with dialogues or expressions involved in silence and strong dramatic charge. And the summit of this career of only eight features since 1977 was SATANTANGO, shot between 1990 and 1994 (18th Mostra selection), pointed out as a masterpiece all around the world, that drove writer Susan Sontag to declare: “Devastating, enthralling for every minute of its seven hours (it actually has 435 minutes). I`d be glad to see it every year for the rest of my life”. His visionary cinema also thrilled American filmmakers as powerful as Gus Van Sant (“its like watching the birth of a new cinema”) and Jim Jarmusch (“his films are like highly recommended events”).

“The film talks about desire, the indestructible yearn for a free and happy life”, says Béla Tarr in his manifesto in Cannes. Anxiety might be the strongest feeling in Tarr’s work. More than the freedom he has always sought in his country, still at the times when he practiced cinema in Super 8. Béla Tarr was only 16, an aspiring philosophy student, when he decided to shoot a political case with gypsies and ended up as a prisoner of the soviet-like regime in Hungary. For that moment, the filmmaker to-be was too brave. His 8mm film re-created the protest of a group of gypsy workers that sent a letter to the boss (Communist Party) with the following provocation, or naivety: “Please, we would like to leave the country. We want to leave for Austria because we cannot live here in Hungary. We have no work, no food, we have nothing.”

Elliptic, unbridled, restless, Béla Tarr’s cinema comes to our days highlighting rupture characters, torn between innocence and complicity. This courage of his inscribes a special chapter in cinema history.

More information in :
www.festival-cannes.org

English version: Laura Rebessi