About half way through Béla Tarr’s new film The Man from London my mind started to wander. Why was this an excellent film, but not a masterpiece like his three previous works: Werckmeister harmóniák [Werckmeister Harmonies] (2000), Sátántangó [Satan’s Tango] (1994) and Kárhozat [Damnation] (1988)? All the trademarks are still in place: epically long, high contrast black and white takes, expressionless protagonists, staccato dialogue, an atmosphere heavy in dread and loathing. The critics likewise have been at something of a loss to explain why this latest offering is not quite as good. What is going on?

Let us start with Tarr’s second film in his late career oeuvre, to set things in their rightful context. Sátántangó is one of most indescribably forbidding and inexplicable films in the history of cinema: seven hours long and composed mostly of ten minute long takes of nothingness and mundane repetition. Set on the Great Hungarian Plain, the inhabitants of a dissolving farm commune plot, cheat and drink themselves stupid, whilst a false messiah, Irimias (Mihály Vig), cons them out of their money, convinces them to abandon their farm and leaves them to rot in urban squalor.

Interpretations by Anglophone critics tend to fall into one of two categories. Firstly, that the film is an allegory of the dissolution of the Eastern European socialist states and an indictment – one way or the other – of the contradiction between collective production and human nature (right critics); or, the cost of the abandonment of the people by the transition states (left critics). The problem, however, is that Tarr refuses either interpretation, especially as the writer of the novel from which the film was adapted - László Krasznahorkai – released the book in the 1980s, before the fall of Communism. The second tendency is for high-brow critics to interpret his films merely as elaborate games: ‘Look how long his takes are’, ‘how eccentric his storylines are’, ‘how long his dolly track must have been’, ‘how strong that wind machine must have been to send all that rubbish blowing everywhere!’. In this vein of thought, Tarr’s films are reduced to cinematic exercises; tour de forces in which every trick in the book is used to conjure a miserabilist, fantasy world.

But the director rejects that interpretation too. When he spoke at the Renoir Cinema in London last year, he again repeated that his aim is always to ‘listen to the people’. Most critics clearly think he is playing coy. After all, if this is listening to the people, it must be a retro peasant-proletariat people that long ago passed away. He is certainly not listening to the annoying ring tones on the night bus like the writers of Sight & Sound magazine. Here we run up against the horizon of interpretation: the limit to which we share the film world of the director, if at all.

A few years ago I met a Hungarian friend and the discussion turned to Béla Tarr’s films. ‘Yes, I love them’, he told me, ‘this is Hungary, this is the truth’. What a shock. My position at the time was probably a combination of left critic and formalist admirer, but it had never crossed my mind that ‘this is the truth’. He continued: ‘people in Hungary hate his films, because they are too close to reality; they don’t want to listen’. His idea, which I now fully accept, is that for all the theological draping and stylistic borrowing from Andrei Tarkovsky, ultimately Tarr is showing the truth of the Hungarian people. It is not a flattering picture, which explains why, unlike so many other directors from small(ish) states, he has never become a national hero.

When I visited Hungary this summer, you could feel the aura of his films in the fabric of the culture. The staccato speech patterns were real, the depressed shuffling of the people very present, the merchandise in the shop windows was faded and thirty years out of date. Exploring beyond the touristy core of the city, in midday, two women were about fifty feet in front: both in their sixties, smoking cigarettes. One of the women stepped out and urinated on the pavement, all the while continuing to chat and smoke with her friend. And the next day, staying at a friend’s house, we were awoke by an elderly neighbour who decided to rant at the top of his voice for two hours that we were plotting against him, in a repetitious, militaristic staccato. It could have been plucked straight from Sátántangó’s humorous plodding along scene.

My point is that for all their formal and groundbreaking stylistic genius, ultimately Béla Tarr’s films are grounded in the reality of Hungarian life. They touch the Real. What critics in the Anglophone world foreclose - not through any conscious ideological cunning, but because it is received wisdom in liberal-metropolitan circles - is that this level of misery and deprivation is something of the past; at least everywhere except Africa. Anyone who focuses on it with such intensity must be a first class miserabilist!

The second point of contact with the Real in Sátántangó is rural, agrarian life. Where we are used to romanticised images of the countryside and are force fed the moral righteousness of returning to serfdom to grow sustainable, organic produce, Tarr’s vision, on the other hand, is horrific. His rural life is not a fun place to go for a country walk before returning to the cottage to put on a DVD. It is a dread-inducing infinity: a lonely place where man is dwarfed by nature, where the rain starts in autumn and doesn’t cease till spring, drenching right into the bones of your body. It is a place where mud clings to the walls, gets in everywhere; a place where boredom and solitude makes man turn against man, and people drown themselves in alcohol to forget their pointless, repetitive existence. It is a place you do not want to go back to. Yet, deep in our consciousness, we know this is our origin. Just as Church bells still strike even the atheist as possessing a certain real spiritual significance, the rural Real exists as a haunting spectre in the imagination of the city dweller.

All of which takes us, by way of contrast, to Béla Tarr’s new film, The Man from London. The title immediately tells you that this is something of a departure from his previous works. Based not on an adaptation of László Krasznahorkai’s novels, but on Georges Simeon, it is a fully internationalised production, even part funded by the UK Film Council, ‘starring’ Tilda Swinton – although she is only present in a couple of short scenes.

Night watchman Maloin (Miroslav Krobot) witnesses a fight in which a mysterious case is lost in the harbour waters. After he scoops out the case and discovers tens of thousands in cash, he finds himself pursued by the burglar. His family life is a disaster: his daughter works in an undignified way at a delicatessen and he does nothing but argue with his wife (Tilda Swinton). He can do little with this loot and his paranoia only ratchets up as the aged Inspector Morrison – the man from London (István Lénárt) – arrives to investigate the case. Speaking in an English accent reminiscent of a scion of the Empire’s greatest ex-administrators, Morrison exudes evil, all the more pronounced because of our tendency to seek redemption in the old. We want to see an image of moral resolution in old age; Morrison though is the embodiment of moral petrifaction.

Better we start with what is good in The Man from London, because by all cinematic standards this is a very good film. The opening shot has to go down as one of cinema’s greatest long shots for its elaborate spider-like movement and the choreography of the action in real time. There is also a certain humanity in this film, notably absent in the director’s previous works. In Sátántangó, we watch a girl torturing a cat for a full forty minutes and then the girl dies because of the neglect of her drunken mother. In The Man from London, Maolin goes out of his way, at least in a clumsy fashion, to care for his daughter. So, perhaps, when at the Renoir talk Tarr described this film as ‘harder and wiser’ than his previous, this is what he had in mind. One shot particularly stands out. Without wishing to give away the details it concentrates on a woman’s face as she is given some terrible news. For what seems like forever, the cameras stays on her frozen face until eventually tears start to break and roll down her cheeks. It is a virtuoso moment.

Unfortunately there are also a number of reasons why this new release will not join his previous works as a masterpiece in the canon. The truth is that, with this film, the critics who see pure formal brilliance in Béla Tarr’s films will have their prejudices confirmed. What the film lacks is that direct short-circuit with the Real that imbued his previous films with such potency. Everything is far too abstract. The multi-linguistic (French, English and Hungarian) port, feels like a superfluous invention for the film’s financing committee and the creepy, nourish lighting is much too close to the weirdness for weirdness sake of David Lynch. In The Man from London, you do not so much feel like you are being thrown into an unfamiliar world, but onto a masterfully crafted film set.