Out of Control...

What are they like..?


The not-so-great British culture of mindless disrespect continues to gather pace.


Coincidental to that saddening newspaper article, picked up a copy of the recent film 'Control' on DVD last week, at a price low enough to dispel the reservations I'd harboured about really wanting to watch this docu-dramatization of the short life & times of Ian Curtis, Joy Division, et al. At least I can say now I've seen it, should anyone enquire, but I must admit to finding the film ultimately disappointing. The cinematography, in monochrome, is beautiful, as one might expect of a work directed by the photographer Anton Corbijn, whose stark images of the band around the bleak wastes of late-1970s Manchester contributed in no small measure to the creation of the myth that grew, snowballed, around them: the whole, whose heart is the back street terraces of Macclesfield, is perfectly realised aesthetically, but this aspect of the film's art overrides all else, it seems to create a distance from any real emotional involvement with the characters & the central Curtis-young wife Deborah (& child)-lover (his) triangle, the dynamic of the essential art-versus-domestic life, dream-versus-duty narrative & its tragic conclusion, which, for all the 3 actors concerned's efforts, feels pretty passionless, cursory & entirely predictable (through familiarity, of course) in its unfolding, all else sketched very slightly around. Although it might be said that the claustrophobic, stifling ennui of the mundanities of daily working & domestic life within the wider context of the decaying industrial cities of the late-70s north of England is effectively communicated, for all that the story is factual, still the film, essentially dramatized documentary (based on Deborah Curtis's written account, 'Touching From a Distance'), somehow lacks the believability, the compelling intensity of fictions such as 'Room at the Top', 'This Sporting Life' & 'A Taste of Honey', of which, in its aesthetic at least, 'Control' is strongly redolent.
Were it not for the reminder of the goose-pimple inducing power of Joy Division's music, actually quite well captured in snippets of live concerts & TV appearances, as sung & played by Sam Riley & the other actors compromising the band, it would seem pretty pointless indeed: there's something very by-numbers about the result, somehow. A shame. And poor Tony Wilson, acted, caricatured again (see also Steve Coogan in 'Twenty-Four Hour Party People' - actually, an altogether much better & more enjoyable piece of cinema, even just the Joy Division segment, suffused with warmth & humour) in a manner that fails to do any sort of justice to the man himself, whose own construction of self was so much more complex & creative: that, perhaps, is one of Control's problems, that the actual people, such larger-than-life characters - also including the other members of Joy Division, their manager Rob Gretton, the producer Martin Hannett - (in) themselves, are so much more interesting than any dramatization, aestheticization of them could ever hope to be, even allowing for the fact that, in the story of 'Control' they are necessarily more minor players supporting the central triumvirate of the Curtises & Annik Honore - you really couldn't make them, or those times, their desperate urgency, the ferment of their creativity, up. See the BBC documentary on the subject of Factory Records instead, especially for the starring role played by the mighty & tragically-late Mr Wilson.