Featuring gorgeous, inky black-and-white photography, Béla Tarr's inscrutable adaptation of Georges Simenon's novel becomes a meditation on fate, free will and frustration. In the bravura, single-shot, 12-minute opening, a French railway worker observes a furtive dockside exchange of a suitcase followed by an attack on its recipient. Retrieving the suitcase from the water, he discovers it's full of British pounds. Could this be a solution to his miseries, which include nagging wife Tilda Swinton and needy daughter Erika Bok? Or is it just the beginning of a whole new kind of misery? The acrobatic camera movements are by regular Tarr cameraman Fred Keleman, whose feature FALLEN played in the 2005 EU Film Showcase.

DIR/SCR Béla Tarr; SCR László Krasznahorkai, based on the novel by Georges Simenon; PROD Humbert Balsan, Christoph Hahnheiser, Christoph Meyer-Wiel, Paul Saadoun, Gábor Téni and Joachim von Vietinghoff. Hungary, France, Germany, 2007, b&w, 132 min. In Hungarian with English subtitles.

Wednesday, November 14, 7:00; Thursday, November 15, 7:00

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