Dir: Béla Tarr, Hungary/France/Germany, 2007, 135 mins, French with subtitles
Cast: Miroslav Krobot, Tilda Swinton, ági Szirtes, István Lénárt
Review by Dave Hall
Hungarian art house director Tarr never knowingly over-employs his editors, preferring instead elaborately staged long takes to draw the viewer in. He's pushed the boat out once again here; literally so in the first few minutes, a glacially paced establishing shot that slowly reveals the bow of a ship in port, from water level to deck, before panning left and right across a seedy dockyard.
The point of view is revealed as that of dour switchman Maloin (Krobot), perched up in his wintry signal box. Every evening he watches passenger's disembark from the ship, and stroll the few steps to the waiting train, which duly carries them away from this desolate seaside town. Maloin's life, by contrast, is going nowhere. He works nights, retires to a nearby bar for breakfast, barely communicates with his wife (Swinton), and watches impotently as his daughter (Erika Bók) is ritually humiliated at work. But then, one night, Maloin witnesses a murder, and finds himself in possession of a suitcase full of stolen money. Is his life about to change? Well, yes, but as is the moralistic way of these things, not for the better.
The story outline may suggest noir thriller, but Tarr's temperament is more Tarkovsky than Tarantino. Though he never quite matches that impressive opening shot, he can deliver mesmerising minutes of screen time with little more than, say, a cavernous, crumbling alley and a boy playing keepy uppy in the medium distance, all captured by DoP Fred Kelemen in lustrous black and white.
But to say this film wears a notoriously troubled production history on its sombre sleeve is an understatement. You have to admire Tarr's tenacity in getting this made at all; the original producer died 10 days into shooting, and the resulting budget cuts, location changes and legal proceedings all disrupted filming. Sadly, if not surprisingly, the finished cut is disjointed and lacks dramatic impetus, the interiors in particular bewilderingly devoid of any sense of time, place or context.
Best to draw a veil, too, over the startlingly amateurish dubbing: the production notes claim that the film is “in” Hungarian, but what came out of the characters badly-synched lips in the preview screening was a stilted stew of French and English – a sign of post-production fiddling, perhaps?
Individual episodes do stand out; the scene in which Maloin confronts his daughter's incensed employer has a genuinely dark energy, a real sense of threat. And in the midst of all the beautifully framed doom and gloom, there's a scene in a shop that seems to have been inspired by the Fast Show 's “Suit You, Sir” salesmen shtick. Mostly, though, it's as much of a plod for the audience as it is for the characters, and the brooding shadow that hangs over proceedings seems less to do with the existential than with the material demands of getting this kind of uncompromising art house film made at all.
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