Indirect participation in a crime transforms a life-weary harbour guard’s view of fundamental existential questions in a crime story that doesn’t allow itself to get tied down by the detective genre. A film noir based on the book by Georges Simenon and created by the director of Satan’s Tango, starring Miroslav Krobot and Tilda Swinton.
Maloin works as a night watchman at a port where the rhythm of his day-to-day work is upset by a crime to which he becomes an unwitting accessory. Though the stereotype of his resigned existence remains unchanged, the man’s life is beset by gnawing existential questions. Is his daughter’s toiling worth it when she can afford to wear a fur collar? Does silence indeed always mean tacit consent? Tarr’s film shows that a genre base can also cultivate a spiritual experience, and that even spiritual absorption allows for suspense. The viewer is encouraged to accept the film’s unconventional concept of time, which ranks it amongst works by Andrey Tarkovsky or films such as David Cronenberg’s Spider. Tarr devotes a comparable amount of time to shots of both faces and objects, and the circumspection with which the characters behave reflects the burden of their chosen destiny. László Krasznahorkai, the author of the novel and screenplay for the adaptation of Satan’s Tango, also contributed to the screenplay for this production.
135 min / Black & white, 35 mm
Director Béla Tarr
/ Screenplay László Krasznahorkai, Béla Tarr podle románu / based on the novel L’homme de Londreas by Georges Simenon
/ Dir. of Photography Fred Kelemen
/ Music Mihály Víg
/ Editor Ágnes Hranitzky
/ Producer Gábor Téni, Paul Saadoun, Miriam Zachar, Joachim von Vietinghoff, Christoph Hahnheiser
/ Production T.T. Filmműhely, 13 Production, Cinema Soleil, Von Vietinghoff Filmproduktion, Black Forest Films
/ Cast Miroslav Krobot, Tilda Swinton, Erika Bók, János Derzsi, Ági Szirtes, István Lénárt
/ Contact Fortissimo Films
Béla Tarr (b. 1955, Pécs, Hungary), one of Hungary’s most prominent directors, began making amateur films at the age of sixteen, he worked in the studio of Béla Balázs and graduated from the Theatre and Film Academy in Budapest. The film Damnation (Kárhozat, 1988) marked his first collaboration with writer László Krasznahorkai, whose novel he also adapted for his seven-hour masterpiece Satan’s Tango (Sátántangó, 1994). The film Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister harmóniák, 2000) was also set in a Hungarian milieu. The Man from London, which was selected for the Cannes competition in 2007, is his eighth feature film. Tarr lectures at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin.
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Van Diemenstraat 100, 1013 CN, Amsterdam
Netherlands
Phone: +31 206 273 215
Fax: +31 206 261 155
E-mail: [email protected]
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