Henriette János Derzsi as Brown Analysis According to critic Martha P. Nochimson, the film is an exploration of the place of anonymous breakdowns of social order in personal life. For the most part, questions of justice operate in the background of The Man From London, which foregrounds the perceptions and point of view of an accidental witness to the murder, who, like the viewer, has no connection with anyone involved. The film principally concerns the texture of the world of the protagonist Maloin as he experiences it first hand: fog, light, shadow, skin, walls, floors, windows, sounds. These are much closer to Maloin than any broken laws involving strangers as in the killing at the dock. As distinct from the trope of crime functioning as a break from the boredom of the mundane for the Hitchcockian ordinary man "excitingly" caught up in it, the interjection of crime in the lives of the characters of The Man from London is a phantom occurrence for those burrowed into the center of the mundane details of their lives. In other words, Tarr's film suggests the possibility that it is only on an abstract plane that murder committed by and on strangers causes a stir and demands an investigation. In this context, it is fitting that the investigation must be undertaken by a stranger, the man from London, since abstraction entails distancing from an enveloping context. Only the appearance of the man from London, Brown, impels Maloin to struggle with his de facto alienation, as an ordinary man, from moral principle, an alienation linked, counterintuitively, to the absence of desire in his daily grind. Background Director Béla Tarr and novelist-screenwriter László Krasznahorkai had been collaborators since making Damnation in 1987. With The Man from London, they sought to adapt the 1934 French language novel L'Homme de Londres by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon. The novel had been twice adapted for film previously; as The London Man by Henri Decoin in 1943, and as Temptation Harbour by Lance Comfort in 1947 with William Hartnell, Robert Newton, and Simone Simon in the lead roles. The Man from London was something of a departure from the social realism of the collaborators' preceding films, as the characters exemplify no social classes and the film focuses on their internal and interrelational dynamics rather than their environment. Tarr explained that he had been drawn to adapt the novel because "it