The Man from London (2007)
DVDRip | MKV | 666 x 572 | x264 @ 1659 Kbps | AC3 2.0 @ 224 Kbps | 133 min | 1,81 Gb
Language: French-English | Subtitles: English for French parts
Genre: Art-house, Crime, Mystery, Drama | France, Germany, Hungary
DVDRip | MKV | 666 x 572 | x264 @ 1659 Kbps | AC3 2.0 @ 224 Kbps | 133 min | 1,81 Gb
Language: French-English | Subtitles: English for French parts
Genre: Art-house, Crime, Mystery, Drama | France, Germany, Hungary
Director: Béla Tarr
One night Maloin, a switchman at a seaside railway station situated by a ferry harbour, witnesses a terrible event. He is just watching the arrival of the last ferry at night from his control room on top of a high iron traverse from where he can see the whole bay. Suddenly he notices that the first of the disembarking passengers, a tall thin figure (a certain Brown as it will turn out later) leaves the harbour, but not on the usual route: after getting through customs, he goes around the dock and then withdraws into a dark corner, waiting. Opposite him, in front of the ship, another man soon appears and throws a suitcase towards the man on the shore. He goes and picks it up, then waits in an even darker corner for the other man to join him. When he arrives, however, they begin to quarrel and finally, in the course of the vehement fight, due to a hit that turns out to be fatal, the shorter one falls in the water and sinks…
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You might not think that Béla Tarr’s bleak, slow-moving meditations on the grubbier side of human nature, showing the capacity of man to aspire to something higher but ultimately be brought back down to earth to wallow in the mire, would have a lot in common with the works of the 1950’s French Crime Fiction writer Georges Simenon, but you might be surprised. If he takes a somewhat unique approach to the thriller genre, Tarr has shown that the detective film noir worldview is perfect for his purposes in Damnation and even Sátántangó, while outside of his rather more leisurely paced Maigret novels, Simenon’s crime fiction and non-genre work often takes on a dark character, the novels populated by little people in dead-end jobs or common professions, eking out a quiet miserable existence in small communities, ground down by troubled family lives and alcoholism, who succumb to a moment of passion or crime when the opportunity presents itself for escape or betterment.
Such is very much the case with Simenon’s The Man From London, and Béla Tarr approaches the dark and bleak qualities of the original scenario with almost complete fidelity, but making it so thoroughly his own that you’d almost think the novel was purposely written for him. In the little bars and cafés of a small French port, where drunken men dance to the mystical voice of the other in lively accordion music, Tarr finds exactly the same type of characters that populate his own films, particularly in the life of a railway switchman working down by the harbour.
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