THE DIEPPE SWITCHMAN
András Bálint Kovács
The Man from London’s protagonist is Brown, a London artiste who says not one word in the film, and appears only briefly. We see nothing of the critical events of his life, and meet him at the moment he loses control over the course of events, drifting helplessly. The real hero of the story is Maloin, the port switchman in Dieppe, Normandy. Although events pass him by, he comes to believe that he is the master of his own fate: his life almost changes completely, but never does. Whatever happens to him happens within: the invisible, unspoken, inferred. The character for whom we feel nothing but sympathy, and on whom the film closes, is Brown’s wife. She appears as the central character of the last twenty minutes of the film, where we find her seated, incapable of uttering a single sentence: it is now that she realises that her life has fallen apart in a matter of moments. It is as if everything that happens to these characters takes place without them. Events and connections, in this film, are like the blowing of the wind outside. Our characters simply stand in silence, helplessly watching events roaring past, believing that they are in charge.
It is as if the most important events in their lives are condensed into a single moment, gesture or pose, in which they are cast like statues, and from which they attempt to break out, but without success. Let us imagine these statues: the man who kills his partner-in-crime, who loses the stolen money, and now, in despair, tries to recover it; his wife, who learns that her husband is a criminal, and that he has been killed; the poor man who finds sixty thousand pounds but with which he only manages to buy a prohibitively expensive fur coat for his daughter, accidentally killing the thief in the meantime, before returning the remainder of the money to the detective; his wife, who desperately tries to understand why her husband, amid such poverty, takes his daughter from her workplace and buys her a fur coat; the daughter, who tries to understand the same while losing her job; and the publican, with whom the absent thief never settles his debt. These sketches form a tragic, living tableau, around which the camera moves slowly, carefully observing and emphasising each detail. There is an earlier tableau-like composition from Béla Tarr’s oeuvre, Autumn Almanac, made twenty years before The Man from London. Now, however, the momentary snapshot is reinforced by a number of motives: an emphasis on the cyclical nature of history; the characters’ almost complete muteness; and their dearth of physical movement. The sole character to talk and move a lot is the only one who is not a victim: Morrison, the English detective who, in the end, walks off with the money.
The essential idea behind this, one of Simenon’s greatest novellas, is the following: there is a man to whom nothing happens, and when events suddenly intrude on his life, he believes that he can master his fate, but can only plummet deeper. In order for this not to happen, he must discard his conscience, his feelings of sympathy, poverty and dignity. As he is unable to liberate himself from such feelings, his crime of keeping the money that does not belong to him renders him incapable of rational behaviour until the point where he must lose everything he ever had. Here, László Krasznahorkai [screenplay author] and Tarr have altered Simenon’s text a little: unlike the film, Simenon accentuates the spiritual process whereby Maloin increasingly identifies with the absent Brown, the way in which he assumes feelings of hopelessness and defencelessness arising from Brown’s crime, and most of all, how Maloin ends up coming into the money that was stolen and then lost by Brown, and which he does not return. Simenon pursues this spiritual process of identification to the point where Maloin accidentally kills Brown during a scuffle at the end, the English detective offers him an escape route which he declines, instead giving himself up to the French police, and ending up in prison. The filmmakers rewrote the ending so that Maloin accepts the escape route, as well as the money offered by the detective, and sneaks away. Tarr and colleagues thus deny him the ‘reward’ that accompanies moral transfiguration, and bring him to a position that is morally, but not necessarily existentially, worse, for any possibility of moral clarification, the recovery or acquisition of honour, is gone. Maloin then becomes, primarily in his own eyes, a nothing, even smaller, more insignificant and hopeless. Although Simenon’s Maloin ends up in prison, he has taken a step forward ethically, moving closer to his moral self. Tarr’s Maloin ends up at the exact place he began, losing only his self-respect.
This cyclicality, the final lack of moral gratification or catharsis, the compulsion to account for loss, is one of Tarr’s characteristic resolutions for his characters, and one of the cornerstones of his thought. In essence, this way of looking at things is inherited from the most pessimistic tendency of neo-realism (The Bicycle Thief or Before the Storm): one is closed in by a circle of defencelessness and social and moral humiliation, and we come to understand how even the last glimmer of hope is lost. We end up feeling that it would have been better not to wake up on that day when the glimmer of hope aroused us.
We might wonder whether and, if so, why it is good to watch this raw hopelessness, this concentration of spiritual and social misery: have we gained anything from this almost two-and-a-half-hour film, in which we see the same subject moving only slightly, over and over again? Tarr belongs to the group of great “process directors,” whose films are not “stories,” but where we see a monotonous, one-way, and yet irresistible process of contingencies, for which the ending is always the same. If Antonioni paints the process of disappearance, Tarkovsky the circle of disappearance and rebirth, and Jancsó is the choreographer of the ritualised historical dialectic of freedom and misery, then Tarr choreographs how this dialectic becomes a monotonous circle, the process of “eternal return,” the circle closing in on itself. As the saying goes, “God writes straight with crooked lines.” This also holds true for the four great “process directors”: Antonioni with disappearance, Tarkovsky with resurrection, Jancsó with the absolute destruction of power, and Tarr with the complete closure of the circle of possibilities, that unavoidable final state towards which everything moves, regardless of what takes place. With Tarr, even the slightest movement is an element of the circle of eternal return. The four directors are, fundamentally, choreographers because, as in ballet, it is not what happens at the end that interests us, but what gets us there. It is no coincidence that all four produce films that are exceptionally long and, whatever our measure, slow. Aesthetic pleasure is gained from modifications of the exact same movement, how many variations a single, defined direction can produce.
There is, however, one thing that distinguishes Tarr from the other great modernists, who are at least one generation older than him (and, in the case of Antonioni, one-and-a-half): compassion for his actors. It is not by chance that the Simenon novel that aroused Tarr’s interest deals with compassion, how a man is duped by his compassion towards another. There is a unique atmosphere to Tarr’s films, because despite their unquestionable compassion, they lack sentimentality, activism and irony: they give rise to no further emotion or ideology. Whoever is unlucky and defenceless, is unlucky and defenceless. It matters not why, or whether anyone can do anything about it. We are not asked to love or to forgive, only to observe, to spend a couple of hours with the feelings of the characters, be they ugly, foolish, or abject, because the film is not about foolishness and abjectness as original qualities, but how one becomes even more defenceless. Each character is a victim in this film: Teddy, whom Brown kills at the beginning; Brown, Teddy’s murder who then loses the stolen money, and whom Maloin kills unintentionally; Brown’s wife, who knew nothing and now stands there helplessly; Maloin’s wife, who doesn’t know what is wrong with her husband, but who sees that he has spent their money on stuff they don’t need; and the publican, who never receives payment for Brown’s tab. It is only Morrison, the detective, who remains unharmed, but when we look at him, we see death.
In most of Tarr’s films, and this includes The Man from London, we see how people in difficult situations make their own lives living hells, thus precluding the possibility of ascent. The viewer coldly observes Tarr’s characters digging themselves deeper into the swamp in which they end up as a result of their environment, family backgrounds, social responsibilities, and human frailties. Maloin represents a ghastly example of a man who suddenly acquires sixty thousand pounds, with which he might claw his family out of their lower-working class existence, and yet he can only mumble or yell at his wife, if he speaks to her at all. He does not tell her what happened, nor does he explain his behaviour. He speaks in the same way to his daughter, whom he only wants to rescue from humiliation. For Tarr, physical misery is not a social agent, as ethical misery is not spiritual. There is the dual presence of a universal condition, where the condition is not present as metaphysical aptitude – there is no need for such – but as a closed process in which things reinforce each other, and from which it appears one could step out at any moment, except for the way things are. This is not God’s creation: man may not live freely in circumstances of his own making, in the midst of the recurring illusion of his own freedom and opportunities. However slowly the films move, we constantly expect these unlucky characters to wake up, or for someone to tell them how they caused their own misery. Yet one cannot even communicate with them: they do not understand one another, and cannot see further than their own noses.
One novelty of The Man from London, in comparison to Tarr’s earlier films, is the characters’ dreadful silence. Tarr has also left behind another facet of his earlier work, the tension created by his characters’ misery, their abject deeds and poetic dialogues. Here, all tension resides in the characters, whose silence and glances can only be read between the lines. It is for this reason that the close-ups bear the greatest weight in the film. Every motivation must be expressed on the face or in movement, for the characters barely speak. Two actors bear the heaviest burden here, Miroslav Krobot, who plays Maloin, and Ági Szirtes, who plays Brown’s wife. Szirtes’s performance is particularly masterful, for she must play the heroine of the last third of the film, and does not utter one sentence throughout, while we see her face in close-up, for minutes at a time. Krobot’s motionless face functions as one of the film’s landscapes: it expresses nothing but renders perceptible the enormous tensions seen through the window, tensions that appear from time to time in aggressive outbursts, so that he can return, unscathed, to the enclosure of his loneliness once again. Tarr treats the other faces in the film (Tilda Swinton, Erika Bók, István Lénárt, János Derzsi) as landscapes too. Not one face moves; the story, or the world moves at an almost imperceptible pace around them – embodied by almost constant, slow camera movement – and this tiny movement is mirrored on the faces as the illusion of change. This is an illusion, for everything exists within the faces, and it is only because of the change in environment that we sense the change in expression, much like so many of Kulesov’s images. The rest of the figures appear to be decorative objects or landscape details, moving ever so slightly in one position: the man stirring his soup in the pub, on whom the camera lingers; the publican himself, who moves only a few metres; the old prostitute who props up the bar like a statue; the two furriers who, in a peculiar post, admire their wares; or the female shopkeeper who, moving through a minute territory, attempts to obstruct Maloin’s attempts to rescue his daughter from her employ. Their stasis is the permanence and immovability of this world.
Tarr uncovers the elements of this static world by means of slow camera movements. Such dramatic composition is based on slow movements revealing the previously unseen, as events roll on. One of Tarr’s signature techniques is the leisurely creation of perspectives following and flowing into one another, of the realisation of internal and external sequences of events. The technique used in this film is the logical opposite of classic narrative mode: we do not depart from the whole in order to come to the detail, but vice versa, our starting point is the close-up of the detail, whence we discover the environment encompassing the detail. This method was first described by Rossellini as his own directorial concept opposed to that of neo-realist narratives. This approach has since become a classic, but here, it is realised most frequently in parallel with some subjective viewpoint. In the second shot of the film, subjective and non-subjective constantly alternate in the slow movements of the camera. An even better example of such is the shot in which we see first the light bulb, and then Maloin’s face, which we follow as he gets up and goes to the window, opens the shutter and sees Brown, who is standing on the street and silently looking upward. Beginning with Maloin’s objective close-up, the frames gradually subjectivize and become his viewpoint, while gradually infusing with Maloin’s growing inner tension, which foreshadow the spectacle that frightened him the moment he saw it.
Music and various sound effects play a greater role here than in Tarr’s earlier films. Their composition is at least as important as that of the images, because the inner life of the characters is only minimally expressed by speech. There is barely a moment of silence in the film, however, in that music or some form of noise are part of every scene, lending a feeling of intensity.
Beyond the almost complete exclusion of speech, Tarr has made his task even more difficult in one further aspect of the film. From a story of an internal, albeit invisible transformation, he has extracted transformation itself and brought forward the story, so that, true to type, there is no chance of deducing anything else from the process than its point of departure. The Man from London is an inner story, in which no psychological or social motivation is disentangled. In this respect the film is most reminiscent of Bresson’s great works: one can discern a couple of Bresson-esque frames, as well as the static and still-life quality of his films. But the risks found in Bresson are also in evidence here, namely that the aptitude of the viewer to find an explanation for what happens.
The Man from London yields a result similar to that of Antonioni’s The Red Desert: the motives of the story are hidden, and the film progresses towards a subtlety that is cumulative, visual, indeed decorative, artistic. As The Red Desert represents Antonioni’s finest film, The Man from London is perhaps Tarr’s maturest, most refined classic to date, both acoustically and visually.
English Translation by Gwen Jones.