Control (2007)

 Control (2007)

Directed by Anton Corbijn
Written by Deborah Curtis (from her book) Screenplay by Matt Greenhalgh

“Even the people who love me hate me.”

Let's look at the movie as a stand-alone story and disregard the actual people depicted. Isn’t it better to treat all the music figure biopics that way as an item unto themselves? Getting into comparing any biographical art to the real person is always hazardous. We are all more than, better, deeper, and far more complicated than what can be mediated no matter what form and the skill sweated into it.

This is a story of Ian Curtis, frontman of old time band Joy Division. Old time?!? Well it was 40 plus years ago.
This intimate movie is not at all bad. Who knows what Curtis would have thought of it? From the movie one would have to guess that it would be too much and not enough. But it hardly matters what the dead would think, they don’t have to think any more.The crematorium smoke drifting into the sky of his remains in the final shot is not thinking smoke, it just is and it goes where it goes and becomes what it does.

Biopics are of course, in their nature exploitive. Ok so what? How’s the movie?
Pretty damn good. For one thing the live band performances are handled very well, with the actors actually playing live. If they are not, it is fauless in the illusion that they are.

Presented in B&W the movie is anti-glamour, gritty, with realfeel.
Sam Riley as Ian is convincing as a young man who felt things got too big, too overwhelming. The band, the success of the band, the marriage to Deborah (Samantha Morton) and their baby daughter, the additional new love Annik (Alexandra Maria Lara), the horror of dealing with epilepsy and the crude pharmaceuticals prescribed to treat it: it's just all too much and he didn’t know how to change or stop things.

Thankfully there are no big glamorous concert scenes, it's mostly the greenroom of low dive clubs for that stuff. Otherwise most of it is staged in the stark flats and grey industrial cities of England.

But life can grow there, raise it’s head and announce its presence, sometimes enough for the whole world to hear its shouts and weeping. 

It’s funny about movies like this that are sort of an exploitation of a life. It doesn’t even stop there. People then type their thoughts about the movie in an act of exploitation of an exploitation.

Thank you.
It was nice to have your attention for these few moments courtesy of long dead Ian and this movie about him.