The Man from London

In an interview with Tilda Swinton in the Guardian in 2007 she talks about seeing Bela Tarr’s The Man from London for the first time. In particular she mentions a scene where the main character Maloin walks along the wharf and a wave rises up and breaks, perfectly timed. For a moment she wondered how Tarr had managed to control the waves. Of course he hadn’t, but Swinton’s comment stands testament to the remarkable command Tarr has with the medium. It seems that every detail in The Man from London, which tells the tale of a modest working man who comes across a briefcase of money, is planned and deliberate to great cinematic effect. Carefully and slowly paced, Bela Tarr’s use of successive long takes creates a sustained, bleak and existential atmosphere rarely achieved so powerfully in film. However, this is at the expense of action and the pace of narrative progression that audiences are used to, meaning that whilst incredibly beautiful, the film is also painfully slow, something that makes The Man from London, as with much of the director’s work, inaccessible to the majority of cinema-goers. [Gail Tolley]