May 17, 2007

Cannes. Control.

Control "By fateful coincidence, the Cannes debut of director Anton Corbijn's cinematic homage to the doomed Joy Division singer Ian Curtis fell just one day short of the anniversary of his suicide, 27 years ago," writes Stephen Dalton for the London Times. The homage, of course, is Control [site] and it's opened the Director's Fortnight. "Starring first-time leading man Sam Riley as Curtis and Samantha Morton as his wife Debbie, Corbijn's portrait of the troubled post-punk icon was well attended and loudly applauded at its first ever public screening."

Pumping her lead with phrases such as "palpable buzz" and "immediate critical acclaim," the Guardian's Charlotte Higgins concurs. What's more, amid rumors and counter-rumors that they had split, the three remaining members of New Order, to which Joy Division changed its name after Curtis's death, flew in to support the film. According to Corbijn, 'New Order hardly agree on anything, but all agree that they love the film.'"

In Variety, Russell Edwards finds it "a riveting, visually arresting portrait of a soul in torment.... Corbijn manages to present working-class Northern England in a wide range of appealing grays that make the description 'black-and-white film' inadequate. Widely anticipated by the band's legion of fans, pic is assured a warm welcome and a successful worldwide tour."

But Ray Bennett, writing for the Hollywood Reporter, puts a bit of a damper on things: "English movies about Northern factory boys played by Albert Finney or Tom Courtenay, who wanted to escape their bleak environment, used to travel well back in the 1960s, but this black-and-white kitchen-sink drama about a fragile pop singer is unlikely to follow in their path."

Stephen Robb gets several quotes from Corbijn and Riley for the BBC.

Updates: Camillo de Marco at Cineuropa: "Corbijn, a rock photographer par excellence (he has produced over 100 album and CD covers, including for U2, REM, Springsteen and Nick Cave) and director of music videos (Depeche Mode, Nirvana, Metallica, among many others) knows his subject and delves into the period marking the beginning of the most creative and prolific moment of the Manchester scene."

Premiere's Glenn Kenny finds Control "such a convincing, intimate and beautiful film that to refer to it as a biopic seems deeply cheap.... Corbijn's picture is more than strong enough to be competition fare. Wow. That sounded kind of Variety-esque, didn't it? I'm just trying to rein myself in, because truth to tell this movie BLEW ME AWAY and I don't wanna get too gushy. But to hell with it. Here I gush."

"Sam Riley, who played Mark E Smith in [24 Hour Party People], is extraordinary in the title role," writes the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu. "In the performance scenes he almost channels the singer, the way his eyes seem to be sinking under the heaviness of gravity, capturing his jerking, possessed movements that resemble those of an anorexic power-walker."

Updates, 5/18: "As a director, [Corbijn] adopts a taut, economical approach to dialogue and a tight narrative that never lingers and is always lunging forward," writes Time Out's Dave Calhoun. "For a debut feature film, it's an impressive achievement which has a sad power and even manages to deliver a few laughs from its parade of Mancunian folk in spite of the tragedy to which it builds."

"[Q]uite superb," writes the Guardian's Xan Brooks. "[W]here Michael Winterbottom's Madchester romp was jubilant and inventive, this is dour and deadpan, threaded through with a dry, lugubrious wit."

"Corbijn reins his trademark sense of style way, way back. The film is a quiet, subtle affair that resists all urges to name drop or dip into nostalgia," writes Todd Brown at Twitch. "The film is a quiet, subtle affair that resists all urges to name drop or dip into nostalgia. Yes, the soundtrack kicks ass and, yes, we see the band in action at several key moments in their career but Corbijn always plays things straight, shooting in beautiful black and white with an almost verite style camera.... Given the nature of Curtis's muse it seems somehow appropriate that a film about his life is one of the quietest, most introverted rock films to hit the screen. It's a fitting representation of the man and his work and sometimes it's just good to be surprised by people doing things right."

"[T]his is a biopic that for once does not do away with art, doesn't trash History at the same time as psychology," writes Emmanuel Burdeau for Cahiers du cinéma.

At his blog, Ray Bennett adds a few words regarding the soundtrack.

"Control doesn't exactly shed new light on Curtis's life and death, but it's a dream match of filmmaker and subject," writes Dennis Lim for IFC News. "[I]t's a bold and touching feat of empathy: without diminishing his mystique, Control makes a mythic figure life-sized."

Update, 5/19: "Corbjin can find a way to convey individual character in the crush and push of a concert crowd scene, and his film's visual sense is as well-modulated as it is well-made; there's nothing here that strikes you with a showy sense of excellence, but the scenes look and feel like part of an organic, carefully contemplated whole," writes Cinematical's James Rocchi.

Update, 5/21: ""The tortured-artist story was a terrible cliché even back when Curtis was living it—which, of course, is part of the tragedy," blogs Rob Nelson for the City Pages. "Control can't begin to match Last Days for punk-style biographical opacity. But, careful not to diagnose an unknowable condition, Corbijn suggests that it wasn't necessarily Curtis's failure to take his meds that put him over the edge - that maybe it was the meds themselves."

Updates, 5/27: "It's a great film: taut, boxed-in, so redolent of the 70s and early 80s that it sometimes edges close to feeling like archive footage," blogs John Harris at the Guardian. "But watching it in Cannes last week, I was struck by what it also says about one of rock music's great absences, and a sexual-political tension that these days seems to have been almost forgotten. A viewing of Julien Temple's accomplished Joe Strummer documentary The Future is Unwritten only underlined the point: from rock's most legendary stories down to the toilet-venue undergrowth, where are the women?"

"The mark of any exceptional film is the won't-go-away factor - a film that doesn't just linger in your head but seems to throb and dance around inside it, gaining a little more every time you re-reflect." And Control is still very much on Jeffrey Wells's mind.

Cannes @ 60. Index.

Posted by dwhudson at May 17, 2007 12:21 PM