The Limits of Control (Jarmusch, 2009): ICA Cinema, 3.50pm
This film is part of the Celluloid Sunday strand at ICA Cinema and the screening also includes the 1993 short Somewhere in California starring Tom Waits and Iggy Pop.
Time Out review:
Let nobody claim that Jim Jarmusch isn’t a grand master of the ironic
Zen shaggy-dog caper, in that every one of his eccentric films features
bewildered men (rarely women) ambling down the road less travelled to
locations of unclear significance. With ‘The Limits of Control’, his ode
to John Boorman’s stark 1967 revenge thriller ‘Point Blank’, he has
delivered a work of dazzling formal discipline that riffs on the simple
notion of repetition and variation. The film’s succession of
cryptic encounters – involving Isaach de Bankolé as a steely, Melvillian
lone gunman on a ‘mission’ in Spain – feel more like painstakingly
sculpted stanzas of a poem than they do twists in some contrived yarn.
Certainly, some will find Jarmusch’s convention-bending games a little
testing, but in craftily withholding so much information about where
we’re headed (or, indeed, where we’ve come from), he forces us to work
harder to find meaning in the film’s ambiguities. Why does De Bankolé
keep visiting that gallery? Why does he always order two single
espressos? What do the absurd outpourings of the supporting players – a
white-haired Tilda Swinton musing on films and dreams, a scraggy John Hurt discussing the derivation of the term ‘bohemian’, etc – actually mean? Jarmusch
takes great pleasure in daring us to suppress our expectations of where
pulp genre films are supposed to take us and the emotional cues they’re
supposed to house. Being black, celibate and monosyllabic, De Bankolé’s
criminal operative inverts all the usual trappings of the traditional
screen gangster, and once you apply that rule to everything within the
film’s exotic, strangely logical world (beautifully photographed by
Chris Doyle), then its point will become clear.
David Jenkins
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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