It may be a lesser work from Béla Tarr, but masterful direction and austere cinematography, not to mention Zeitgeist’s top-notch transfer, make it an indelible, if occasionally exhausting, experience.
The Man from London, Tarr's latest film, is some way below his best, yet it stands among the week's conventional releases like a baleful dark meteorite among a collection of shiny marbles.
Stretches of The Man from London may hint that Tarr is caught in a similar creative impasse (the film is closer to the territory of Damnation than its immediate predecessors), but the peculiar pleasures of his cinema are still to the fore.
It's a film about looking and listening, with a suggestive minimalist soundtrack and ravishing black-and-white cinematography by German filmmaker Fred Kelemen. Tarr's slow-as-molasses camera movements and endlessly protracted takes generate a trancelike sense of wonder, giving us time to think and always implying far more than they show.
Each sequence in The Man From London is a single tracking shot that moves effortlessly between the many touchstones (close-up, subjective POV, long shot) of film grammar.