Béla Tarr on 'The Man from London'

Visionary Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr’s latest filmtells a story of deceit,theft and murder. But, as he explains to Wally Hammond, that was not his primary interest

The man in front of me looks like he’s been carrying rocks up and down a mountain for the last two years. It’s Béla Tarr, the great Hungarian filmmaker of ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’ and ‘Sátántangó’ fame, sitting slumped in a chair in a Piccadilly hotel suite. The director is on the first rounds of the publicity tour for his noir-inflected Simenon adaptation, ‘The Man from London’ – which details the effects on a lonely, married nightwatchman of discovering and appropriating a stash of stolen cash. It was a complicated, expensive shoot – during which his working partner Humbert Balsam, to whom the film is dedicated, committed suicide – and you can trace the half-life of the strain on the extraordinary, 53-year-old director’s features.

‘This was the most expensive film I’ve ever made – it cost €2 million just to set up – and I never want to be in the same situation again!’ the tired-looking but fearsomely intense director tells me. ‘Some of the time, it was like a nightmare and I remember feeling that I’d rather be in charge of an army, as this mass of construction workers turned up to build the tower in Corsica we needed for the watchman, Maloin.’

It’s the first time I’ve met Tarr and I’m struck by his powers of attention and his passion. It is his extraordinary ability to
make palpable those same qualities in his movies that helps make him the unique director he undoubtedly is. His
greatest gift, however, is one he shares, despite their very different working methods, with Eric Rohmer: that supreme ability of the finest directors at their peak to make us viewers aware of their characters’ feelings and thoughts, totally independent of whether those characters speak or not, and of what they say if they do.

But for this difficult, demanding, formally experimental but deeply communicative Hungarian, such accomplishment has involved a long, hard journey: from his teenage years making amateur documentaries, to his debut feature in 1977 (‘Family Nest’), through the self-imposed hard slog of his subsequent seven features. Notwithstanding later successes, with ‘Sátántangó’ in 1994 and ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’ in 2000, you can still safely presume the sum total of British cinéastes who have seen all his films is outnumbered by the dozen or so drunken Titanic Bar stumblebums he so beautifully orchestrates in his hallucinatory, melancholy, metamusical ‘Damnation’ of 1988.

True, Tarr has placed many a stumbling block in the way of immediate worldwide fame. Making films in black and white doesn’t help. Neither do the characteristic, painstaking sequence shots and long takes – often 11 minutes or more – he favours. Ditto his avoidance of direct political allegory, and his Bressonian preference for what he calls ‘presence’ in his actors. Worse is his fascination with the suspension of normal approaches to time – the seven-hour ‘Sátántangó’ can place inordinate demands on the hardiest of viewers’ buttocks.

Tarr remonstrates: ‘People misunderstand my attitude towards long films,’ he says. ‘During the preparations for “The Man from London”, we made a short, “Prologue” – and I’m just as proud of that five-minute movie as I am of “Sátántangó”.’ In Tarr terms, ‘The Man from London’ isn’t long – clocking in at a consumable 135 minutes. But, with its Corsican location shoot, its French language dubbing, its international cast (including our own Tilda Swinton as Maloin’s wife) and Euro financing, it marks quite a dramatic change of direction for the director. What was it, I wonder, that led him to abandon his habitual Hungarian sources and collaborators and take on an adaptation of the celebrated Belgian writer?

‘I read Simenon’s book one summer’s evening about 25 years ago and I was really impressed by the atmosphere. The other thing I particularly liked was the character of Maloin (the nightwatchman, played by Czech actor Miroslav Krobot). He’s somebody who is quiet, a really solid kind of person, a bit grumpy. And this was enough to give me that initial impetus. ‘But later on, when I actually immersed myself in the topic, I realised that there is one very important thing that someone can make a film about: how man meets temptation, especially that kind of temptation that suggests the possibility of new ways to live.
Maloin finds £60,000 in a suitcase and it’s a huge amount of money for him. So it’s about how he falls, how he revolts against his old life. That is what the film is about, not the £60,000.’

Which makes me wonder whether this famously melancholy and rebellious ex-communist might be in revolt in some way himself. Has he changed his attitude over the years? ‘Well, even at the beginning [of my career], I didn’t want to cause any trouble or make a revolution. I simply realised that a film was a means of talking about reality, and I believed that it could go some way in changing the world. But as I grew older I realised that a film is not going to make the world change. I realise now that I must have had serious illusions, because the problems are not just social ones but ontological ones as well.

‘What’s more, I go further these days, and say that the problems are on a cosmic scale. So I’ve become a very modest person over the years and I just think that all I want to make are some changes in the film world, to make changes in film language itself.’ But, surely, one can detect in ‘The Man from London’ suggestions of a new – possibly spiritual – optimism at work? ‘Yes, you’re absolutely right – you’ve hit the nail on the head. There was a different ending in the novel and the original script, and the one we opted for. The one we used is actually an optimistic ending – even though it’s also a bitter one – because at least we see an innocent person. This is the real optimism – to show that there is still at least one innocent person in this world.’
‘The Man from London’ opens Dec 12.

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