My hometown, Kamloops, population 85,000 people, is having its annual film festival now. By the time these films come to Kamloops, they’re all pretty much available on DVD already, but what a treat it is to see these films on the silver screen. I couldn’t pass on seeing Control.
How awesome Control is, directed by Anton Corbijn, telling the story of the last few years of the life of Ian Curtis, singer of the band Joy Division.
The film is a first feature for Corbijn, who has had a career photographing bands (including Joy Division) since the 1970s, and has had much success making music videos from the early 1980s until the present.
He brings such control to Control, which the characters of the film can’t escape from. They seem trapped by the shadows, by the brick, by the wallpaper, by the black & white, by their bodies and their minds. The antithesis of this control is the epilepsy of the main character Curtis. As I recall, there’s only two or three scenes in the whole movie which actually leave the city — the scene where the young Curtis proposes to his girlfriend, the scene where the band is driving back from London and he has a seizure on the side of the motorway at night, and the awesome final shot of the movie, which pans up from the church, and black smoke is expelled from the chimney, and the distant hills are seen. It’s a release.
How intense the movie is. And how intense the music is.
Official Control trailer: