Safe Return Doubtful

Hungary – 2007 – in French

The best directors can make us look at cinema in a different way, the Hungarian, Béla Tarr is such a filmmaker. 

This story started life as an excellent Georges Simenon novel, published in 1934. 

On a cold, foggy night in the channel port of Dieppe, railway signalman Louis Maloin is sitting alone in his watchtower, looking down on the docks at the ferry just arriving from England. Maloin has been working the same job for thirty years, with the same routine every night, drinking his coffee with brandy and smoking his pipe in the same position at the same time. 

He watches as one of the newly arrived passengers fights with another man and knocks him into the water, along with the suitcase he is holding. Aware that he appears to be the only person who has seen this happen, Maloin retrieves the case from the water when nobody is around and takes it home with him. 

It is extremely rare that having read and enjoyed a book that I find its cinematic adaptation gives the same pleasure, and in this case, even more. 

Tarr uses hauntingly composed black and white photography that you feel you could look at for hours, and certainly Tarr does give you time. The opening shot of the hull of the ship docked in Dieppe, with the shimmer of lamplight on the dockside make for a powerful start, and force us to contemplate it. Indeed, we get a good five minutes to do so.  

The film unravels at a slow pace, with the camera holding on certain images for minutes as it did in the opening, grimy and insignificant they may seem.  Simenon’s writing was dark, and with Tarr’s skill we soon realise that this is a place from which there is no escape, a wretched wasteland.  

Tilda Swinton plays Maloin’s wife, almost as a hidden part of his surly character.  

There is a forlorn beauty to the film which is difficult to describe, it must be seen, but I say that in the full knowledge that some who do so will leave it disenchanted. That bleak and cold atmosphere eats into you in such a way that you may reach for a jacket, or turn the heating up. 

The scenes in the cafe are the most memorable for me; the constant playing dirge-like accordion, dialogue designed for its audio quality as much as its content, and those strange souls who inhabit it. 

In our modern world of fast action CGI generated features it is a particular pleasure to slow things down. 

I think Simenon would have loved it.

IMDb score 7 / 10 – My Score 10 / 10