This time Tarr has drawn on a short story by Georges Simenon, best known for his Maigret books (in no small measure due to their adaptation for film and television). Simenon's L'Homme de Londres, which was translated as Newhaven-Dieppe, is an early masterpiece which has already yielded two films: L'Homme de Londres of 1943, directed by Henri Decoin, and Temptation Harbour of 1947, directed by Lance Confort and starring Robert Newton, Simone Simon and the then 40-year-old William Hartnell, later to become famous as the original Dr Who of the 1960s. Most strikingly, this story does not feature the inspector, because the Maigret stories always have a resolution in the shape of the Master himself. It is not just a matter of his being able, through observation coupled with deep familiarity with the ways of the world and insight into human nature, to work out the motive for a crime, to identify and bring the culprit to justice, though this would allow any reader or viewer to sleep at night safe in the knowledge that all is in order and functioning smoothly in the world. But of course Maigret represents more than that-something more than formal legal rectitude (after all, in some of his cases, he feels entitled to let the guilty party go free), yet not blindfolded Justice either. Maigret is never blindly ignorant (at most he may deliberately turn a blind eye): he is very much a person who keeps his eyes open. His cool, but never cold eagle eye is that of an outside observer who well understands the pressing worries and petty desires that can drive a person to crime, but without being tempted to give in to them himself.
The world of The Man from London is far grubbier and darker for Maigret's absence. There is a detective, but he's a foreigner, an Englishman who comes over by ferry to retrieve the money and return it to its rightful owner. To do that he, too, would need to be familiar with the mentality of the people he is holding under surveillance, with what makes them tick, but unlike Maigret, he has no interest in serving justice on matters that are none of his business. This detective, Morrison (István Lénárt), plays a key role in Tarr's film, because viewers would feel totally lost were it not for the succinct English- or French-language explanations that he supplies from time to time.
For when it comes down to it, Tarr is not filming stories: he is not in the business of telling stories with the aid of pictures, producing moving picture-books for "readers" in an illiterate age. He belongs to that rare and dying breed of filmmakers who regard film as a work of art, indeed a Gesamtkunstwerk: "I have said it a thousand times before, that film is picture, sound, rhythm, noise, music, human looks, metacommunication-everything but story," to quote him. That holds even for the films in which he has managed to convey the detail of two of László Krasznahorkai's novels (or sections of them)

with such staggering accuracy-although he does anything but chop the written texts into scenes and set these in visual terms. Tarr doesn't just speak the language of film, he thinks in its terms too; he doesn't take the literary material and simply adapt it for the cinema screen, but he reconstructs it, which means he first has to break it down into its component parts.

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Not for a second, then, should one suppose that Tarr's films are abstract models of everyday human existence. Nothing could be further from the truth; one is always presented with people of flesh and blood who are facing very true-to-life situations with all too real emotions and motivations. Those emotions and motivations are so uncomplicated that there is no need for any psychologising, the basic setup is self-explanatory. The fundamental condition is one in which people attempt to face up to what they have lost. It's not that I think individual human fates are treated as negligible in Tarr's films, or that a growing number of followers now enjoy them simply for their stylistic bravura as they join Tarr in the utterly weird worlds of a rundown socialist-era mining village, a remote farmstead in the rural flatlands, or a market-town in the Great Hungarian Plain.
Ever since Satan's Tango, Tarr has worked in co-production arrangements, using non-Hungarian actors. Nevertheless, The Man from London is the first film in which Hungarian is not spoken and the story is not quintessentially Eastern European. (Judging from the enthusiasm with which it was welcomed by foreign critics, and the slight bewilderment of domestic critics, the points of reference have shifted: from Tarkovsky to the classic film noir.) One might also see the decision to shoot the film outside Hungary as a large step in the career of a director who has always used very specific set-ups-whether places or types of people-that he knows inside out. My guess is that some of the "formal" approaches of The Man from London-the frequent references back to the earlier films, the even sparer use of dialogue and panning-can be attributed to that foreignness. Simenon's superb novella is a very French story about French people. The tower at night may well have been the visual starting-point, but for a Hungarian director to be able to engage with this French story another foreigner was needed: the man from London.
Like other auteurs, Tarr avers that he is always directing the same film, just doing a slightly better job of it every time. That may be, but it is also possible that The Man from London is an experiment, and that we shall eventually look back on it as a sort of autumn almanac, marking the end of one creative period and the start of another.