guardian unlimited's review of control

From the UK's Guardian Unlimited

Control
Directed by Anton Corbijn

Review by Peter Bradshaw from the 2007 Cannes Film Festival
Four stars out of five

The Brits may not be in the official competition at Cannes, but a British film has certainly scored a sensational success here, opening the director's fortnight sidebar. Anton Corbijn's Control is about the troubled life and times of post-punk legend Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, who killed himself in 1980 at the age of 23, depressed by his epilepsy, his failing marriage and by the uncontrollable intensity of the nihilistic emotions displaced by his life into his art - emotions that consumed him.

Corbijn's movie is shot in a stunning high-contrast monochrome, perversely turning Macclesfield's grimness into grandeur. It effortlessly revives a British cinematic style that you might call beautiful realism, reaching back to Christopher Petit's Radio On, and further back to Tony Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and A Taste of Honey. And in fact Ian Curtis's working-class married life, with its pram on the step and the stark laundry hanger in the kitchen, looks straight out of the 1960s.

Sam Riley gives a superb performance as Ian Curtis, intuitively recreating his on-stage mannerisms, from the stock-still hunch over the mic, with eyelids lowered, to the crazy, elbows akimbo running on the spot routine, which like nothing else made him look like some sort of visionary outpatient.

Samantha Morton gives an intelligent, sympathetic performance as Curtis's wife, Debbie, whom he married when they were both in their teens, as virtually child-bride and groom, and Toby Kebbell is outstanding as Rob Gretton, the wisecracking manager.

Riley sees Curtis not as a self-destructive gloom-monger but a thwarted Wordsworthian romantic who loved two women equally, and simultaneously feared and longed for a loss of control: an escape into music and an escape from his body. Corbijn does not indulge in the cliche of seeing epilepsy as an ecstatic state, but certainly suggests how the convulsiveness and jittery subversion of Curtis's music might imitate a pre-epileptic state: culminating in a full-blown episode live on stage.

To men of a certain age (and I admit I am one) the period music detail of this movie makes it a very powerful madeleine, and when John Cooper Clarke came on, I pretty well levitated out of my seat with happiness.

The gentleness and wit with which Corbijn recreates Curtis's uncool day job in the unemployment benefit office are also a treat. It is in a way comparable to Michael Winterbottom's 24-Hour Party People, in which Riley incidentally played Mark E Smith, but far fiercer, and bleaker, and darker. Control gripped the audience at Cannes; it had atmosphere.


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