![]() |
Sam Riley excels in this heartbreak life story of Ian Curtis |
Director: Anton Corbijn
Cast: Sam Riley (Ian Curtis), Samantha Morton (Deborah
Curtis), Alexandra Maria Lara (Annik Honoré), Joe Anderson (Peter Hook),
Toby Kebbell (Rob Gretton), Craig Parkinson (Tony Wilson), James Anthony
Pearson (Bernard Sumner), Harry Treadaway (Stephen Morris), Andrew Sheridan
(Terry Mason), Matthew McNulty (Nick Jackson)
Depression is no respecter of fame or success. You can have
everything many people would give their right arm for, and still find the
prospect of life overwhelming. Control
is a heartfelt, deeply affecting film about Joy Division lead singer Ian
Curtis, who committed suicide shortly before a career-changing tour of America.
Anton Corbijn knew Curtis and the band personally, and his deep connection with
this story is obvious in every frame of this beautifully shot film.
In 1975, fresh out of school, Ian Curtis (Sam Riley) marries
Deborah Woodruff (Samantha Morton). Curtis is a would-be poet, but finds his
interest piqued when he attends a gig by the Sex Pistols and quickly forms a
band – Joy Division – with a group of friends. Powered by Curtis’ imaginative
lyrics, the group starts to make a name for itself, taking on a manager Rob
Gretton (Toby Kebbell) and winning the attention of the influential Tony Wilson
(Craig Parkinson). However, all is not well with Curtis: beginning to suffer
increasingly from epilepsy, Curtis is also falling in love with a young Belgian
journalist Annik Honoré (Alexandra Maria Lara) while still in love with – although
increasingly lacking in mutual understanding with – Deborah. These pressures
slowly build up on Curtis.
Control is a film
about a person’s longing to have security and a sense of mastery over their own
life, but finding they lack both this and the emotional strength to deal with
the consequences. Curtis is a man buffeted by competing pressures and desires,
as well as a paralysing fear that epilepsy will eventually claim his life. He
is frequently unable to relax, and tries his utmost to divorce himself from the
reality of his situation by living as much as he can in the moment, ignoring
until it is impossible the burdens of making choices about his life and
relationships.
Living in the moment is what, for Curtis, makes it all possible.
You can see it in reflection in his performances of Joy Division songs – the
intense focus, mixed with the channelling of his own epileptic fits into a
series of mesmeric on-stage dances, filled with wild and jerky movements. The
entire film suggests much of Curtis’ output could be retrospectively seen as a
cry for help, many of his lyrics about concerns that would eventually lead to
him taking his own life. At one point, Curtis sings heartbreakingly of his
isolation in a recording studio booth – with Corbijn cutting straight to the
rest of the band and studio technicians talking and going about their business
in the studio, oblivious to the underlying desperation that runs through it.
Because the film makes clear no one knew how to help Curtis or
even how to identify his problem. To his manager and the band, its all part of
the rough and tumble of rock ‘n’ roll. To his studio, it’s the artistic
personality. Doctors seem to barely understand how to treat his epilepsy and
miss all the signs of the personal stress it places on him. Neither his wife
nor girlfriend can imagine that his guilt and self-loathing run as deep as they
do.
Corbijn’s beautifully evocative black and white photography adds
hugely to this sense of dream-like non-reality around Curtis’ life, against the
backdrop of some beautifully rendered Macclesfield locations. It helps
wonderfully capture the sense of Curtis’ life somehow never coming fully into colour,
as well as adding a deeply affecting air of melancholy over every frame. It’s
also perfect for capturing the atmosphere of the 1970s clubs and bars that the
band experienced.
The photography gives the film a feeling of the classic
kitchen-sink dramas of the 1960s, and that is no bad thing, adding a certain
depth to the tragedy of a working-class lad swept up by success and largely
unable to cope with the burdens of expectation. Curtis is shown to be
constantly overwhelmed by the pressure of live performance and the expectations
of fans and viewers, yet also desperate to continue to have this channel to
express himself.
Corbijn doesn’t give him a free pass though, and shows how he
deliberately distanced himself from Deborah and their child. Often silent and
disengaged, with a glazed look of a man who would rather be anywhere else than
having to support a wife and child before he was 20, Curtis and Deborah’s
marriage is one of affection but no shared interests of outlook. Deborah
clearly provides Curtis with no kindred-spirit feeling, but he uses her as an
emotional prop. Simultaneously he uses Annik for the same, while conducting an
affair that clearly gives him a deep sense of shame, but finds impossible to
resist. It’s living in the moment again: clearly, at every point, he would
rather forget the other woman altogether, and is incapable of making the final
life-altering decision needed.
This balance works so well because Sam Riley is astonishingly good
as Curtis – real, pained, gentle, tender, selfish, with eyes that seem to have
the life and will to go on drain out of them as the film goes on. Riley’s
performance is pitch-perfect, and his empathetic brilliance for this man who
did not know how to express his own feelings clearly is deeply moving. Over the
film you see a sensitive man slowly fall apart in self-loathing, feeling
trapped in his own life and unable to break free.
The film is stuffed with excellent performances, with Samantha
Morton very good as Curtis’ deeply caring wife who unwittingly smothers him
with demands – demands that are more than fair considering she is left
frequently to hold the baby while her husband disappears for days on end.
Alexandra Maria Lara has less to work with, but does a lot with Annik. Toby
Kebbell provides some much needed lightness as Joy Divison’s manager, a
blistering, foul-mouthed force of nature who can’t even begin to entertain the
idea that his lead singer might consider ending his life.
The final sequence of the film, as Curtis (off camera) decides to
follow-through on committing suicide (his second attempt to do so, another
clear sign of those around him being totally unable to respond to the signals)
is unbearably sad, ending with a beautifully evocative, tear-inducing shot of
the crematorium releasing its ash - the last vestige of this lost life – into
the sky to drift and disperse freely in a way Curtis never could. Control is a modern classic of British
realism and possibly one of the finest music biopics ever made. Corbijn has the
soul and eye of an artist, and brings all this to bear on a deeply heartfelt
and moving film.
No comments:
Post a comment