dir: Anton Corbijn
It's... hard for me to review something like this. Perversely, I have
adored Joy Division's music since I was a child, but I never much
bought into any of the mythologising of Ian Curtis as a tortured
genius who died far too much before his time by his own hand. I say
'perversely' because despite having listened to both Closer and
Unknown Pleasures more times than you've masturbated, I never really
had a burning desire to find out more about the events leading up to
Curtis's suicide.
Also, fairly recently, the Michael Winterbottom film 24 Hour Party
People seemed to deal with the Joy Division and Curtis story with the
care and attention it deserved, devoting half (the good half) of the
flick to their tale. Sure, it might have had the depth of a puddle of
spilled beer, but I wasn't really hungry for more.
Control has managed to make a fool out of me, making me doubt the
flick's and maker's intentions at first, and the validity of the
central performance, before it absolutely and utterly drew me in
before blowing me away.
It took half an hour of this two hour film before I could accept Sam
Riley as Ian. It is, not discounting the scenes where the band is
performing, a subtle performance which requires great skill in not
rendering a character into a caricature. Reilly manages that in a
grimly uncomfortable fashion.
At first I felt the film was trading in affectations and clich=E9s that
damn most stories about artists into the pathetic narratives they
usually end up following and being. Eventually it won me over, but it
was worth the wait.
It depicts Curtis as a genuinely tormented individual, tormented by
the circumstances of his life as well as his epilepsy. But mostly he's
depicted as someone who never intended to become the figure he became.
It's something of a difference from the narratives where someone rises
from obscurity to fame and riches only to be destroyed by fame, drugs
and their own hubris. Curtis died before ever achieving anything apart
from modest success, and certainly wasn't destroyed by wealth or fame.
He was, however, unready for a life as a lead singer, and unwilling to
become a public figure. Performance never interested him, and the
burdens of public scrutiny are of far less danger than the
expectations of crowds who he sees as draining his very life.
His seizures take a greater toll as time rolls on, and really, we're
mostly looking at the events of a single year here. The man died at
23, so it's not really a saga. More of an intricately elaborated upon
snapshot of a person who was never going to survive in this world.
The biggest problem in his life, as depicted here, is his inability to
reconcile himself to his early marriage to Debbie (Samantha Morton), a
girl he cuts his best friend's lunch to get. He sees it as the
fundamental mistake of his life, from which little else could go
right. The scenes where he looks at his life, wife and child with
queasy discomfort are disturbing, painful but true. They're true in
the sense that his utter inability to appreciate the home and hearth
in another man would usually result in a man going out for some
cigarettes and never coming back, as the euphemism goes. But for
someone like Ian, suffering as he seems to do from a crippling level
of depression, who still strangely loves his wife despite his
carryings-on with another woman, Annik (Alexandra Maria Lara), he
doesn't really see any options.
The music plays such a fundamental part of the film, to such a point
that the recreations of gigs or clips are uncanny in their
verisimilitude. But as great as those scenes are, the ones that
resonate the most and torment the viewer the most are the quite ones
of Ian struggling with the ugliness inside, sitting alone or viewing
his family with quiet horror.
The evocative black and white cinematography captures the sense of the
grimness of his existence, but it manages to be beautiful in its own
right. It makes sense, since director Anton Corbijn is famous more as
a photographer than a director.
I know that everything I've written so far makes this sound like an
excruciating and pretentious exercise in futility, even for an
obsessive fan of the band. Curtis himself doesn't look like he's
cracked a smile or laughed in his life, but the other characters in
the film counterbalance his dourness with their humour. The other
members of Joy Division, including the anal retentive Bernard Sumner
(James Anthony Pearson) and especially Hookie (Joe Anderson) and their
manager seem like beacons of light in what would otherwise drown us in
Curtis's overwhelming darkness.
Tony Wilson gets a look in again, this time in a similarly flamboyant
portrayal, but in a far less self-important role compared to Steve
Coogan's over the top work in 24 Hour Party People. Craig Parkinson
manages to resurrect the lunatic in a far more subtle but no less
interesting portrayal, doubly sad due to Wilson's death recently.
Samantha Morton has a thankless role as the nagging wife, which is a
surprise to me since the book is mostly based on Debbie Curtis bio/
autobio Touching from a Distance, which I thought would have made her
look more sympathetic. But it doesn't, so we can only hope that makes
it more credible.
What Sam Riley does here is simultaneously compelling and sickening to
watch, and I mean in that a positive sense. If you know his fate, then
much of it is a slog to the inevitable shuffle towards the gallows,
but it is no less powerful because of that. He manages to give you an
inkling of why such a course of action was inevitable, and, dare I say
it, probably the only path open to him.
It's an awful thing to say about someone so young and so talented, but
he could have ended up doing something even worse, as some people do
who can't decide between whether they should live, or whether their
families should live, or neither.
After all, doesn't it demystify some of the 'glamour' of rock star
self-destruction and the romanticism of dying young when the
protagonist is represented as committing suicide because he fears how
much worse his epilepsy is going to get, and because he can't let go
of his wife or of the other woman he loves?
It's hard, unless you're of a certain bent, to 'enjoy' the depiction
of such a character generally, because generally depressive, suicidal
characters are as irritating in film as they are in real life. Control
goes a long way towards engendering sympathy in the audience without
sugar-coating the essence of what made him who he was, or without
praising him to the high heavens as a tragic genius either.
Was Curtis a musical genius? I couldn't possibly comment. Their music
has so often been the soundtrack playing in my head since my teenage
years that there's no way I can be objective about his place in the
musical firmament. Everyone has heard Love Will Tear Us Apart so many
times that it's as irritating as any of the worst advertising jingles
you can think of. But so many of their discordant, majestic songs
blaze a path through the veins and nerves of even the hardest and most
cynical, that discounting them or their influence on music of the last
thirty years or so seems foolish.
Control honours the man, and honours the music, and does so without
wedging his sorry tale into the generic muso biopic formula. But that
doesn't mean it is an upbeat or pleasant way to spend two hours. It is
harrowing and disturbing, and uncomfortable, but no less compelling
because of it.
This is a great film for fans, and is an excellent double bill with
the recent Joy Division documentary directed by Grant Gee. For anyone
else, including people who've never heard of Joy Division, or can't
stand them, or who haven't heard of any new music since Perry Como put
out his last album, this film would be the most horrible way
imaginable to spend two tortuous hours. Avoid or embrace, as is your
wont.
8 versions of Dead Souls which are never nearly as good as the
original out of 10
--
"It's like it's not happening to me but someone pretending to be me.
Someone dressed in my skin" - Control.
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