The Limits of Control

Someone needs to tell Jarmusch and like-minded directors and writers that monotone conversations about the nature/meaning/origin of so-and-so are to art films what sweaty men walking away from explosions in slow motion are to big-budget post-Bruckheimer action flicks. For all of Jarmusch's talk in his interview with Gavin Smith in Film Comment about avoiding clichés he seemed to fall into that trap pretty easily. Much of the dialogue in the film is really quite horrible, shallow, miserable artsy nonsense. Then you have some conversations, particularly in the latter half of the film, which are absolutely wonderful. You also have to look at the fact that the 'horrible' dialogue in the previous conversations ultimately worked as they were necessary for the thematic aspects of the film to make sense in the beautifully confusing way they do. Glad to say I was wrong about Jarmusch being the emperor's new clothes and that "The Limits of Control" is a spectacular aesthetic achievement thanks to both Jarmusch and DP Chris Doyle's work. It's absolutely wonderful overall, leading up to an absolutely fantastic final thirty minutes. It has its flaws and certainly could've done without people approaching and leaving in slow motion which just seemed really cheesy but overall this is just a top-notch film, and the comparisons made to Rivette films like "Pont du nord", "Paris nous appartient", and "Out 1" in the aforementioned Film Comment interview by Gavin Smith and Jarmusch himself not only make sense, but are well-deserved. A cinematic enigma, and nothing is more attractive to me than that.

An abstract reflection on power and its transience. A risky film by Jim Jarmusch which, despite having stars in secondary roles, having the exoticism of being filmed in Spain and having many of the qualities to which this irreverent North American independent filmmaker has accustomed us, ends up leaving a slight bitter taste in the mouth.

Deep down because Jarmusch stripped the film of everything superfluous, summarizing it as a bare course, without a classic plot beyond the essential message. Life is short and all power is vain and transitory. A simple journey whose destination is discovered at each stop.

I'm not going to waste anyone's time with subjective yammering, whether it be positive ("a cinematic tour de force!") or negative ("pretentious artsy fluff!") because, let's face it, those comments don't mean squat to anyone but the person saying it.

Instead, just rifle through this list of movies and if you liked any of them, you'll probably like this movie.

"Tetro" (director Francis Ford Coppola, 2009), "Broken Flowers" (director Jim Jarmusch, 2005), "Before It Had a Name" (director Giada Colagrande, 2005), "A Scene at the Sea" (director Takeshi Kitano, 1991), "Der Himmel über Berlin" a.k.a. "Wings of Desire" (director Wim Wenders, 1987), "Paris, Texas" (director Wim Wenders, 1984).

If you haven't heard of, or seen, any of those then just bear in mind that "Limits of Control", like the movies mentioned above, is very slow, almost uneventful, without a lot of revealing dialogue to carry the story. These stories are told in images, and it can be a real challenge keeping up, not because there are a lot of crazy twists and turns, but because there's almost nothing. I could sum up the plot of this movie in 8 words: "a day in the life of a hit-man". But if you're up for a challenge, give it a shot.

I guess for Jim Jarmusch, the shot, not the characters or the narrative is the building block and center of the film. Each shot is almost a minor Magritte painting with some detail incongruous enough to make us chuckle or wonder WTF. Why does the lead character order two cups of espresso? Why does the character wear those too tight shiny suits? What is the meaning of the constant exchanging of match boxes? This movie could be called "Match boxes and coffee" instead of "Cigarettes and Coffee," an even slower movie Jarmusch. The narrative is without excitement or tension. For a brief moment I had hoped that Jarmusch would pick up the pace when the hero saw the armed camp/complex. I thought the hero would race down and shoot ten or twenty men and jump out of the way of army jeeps and bound over walls to get inside. Nope, not this movie. Jarmusch just has the character appear inside the complex in the next scene and mysteriously hint at the way he got in. The movie does pick up in about five or six scenes with Paz De La Huerta. She is just called Nude and she appears in a series of what seems like nude poses. It is quite erotic and does make the first half of the picture move entertaining. There is also a nice dialogue scene about Orson Welles "Lady from Shanghai." These are the highlights of the film for me ten minutes watching Paz De La Huerta act without clothes, a discussion of "Lady from Shanghai" and those too tight shiny suits. Amusing, but too laid back.

I like Jim Jarmusch personally (I first met him when we were both new to NYC, in the early '80s) and as a filmmaker, but I believe LIMITS was a mistake. He needs to seek out a wise old mentor, I suggest Werner Herzog (who recently reinvented his career with 3 fine Hollywood genre films in the manner of Sam Fuller, one of Jim's heroes). Otherwise he has fallen into an easy trap: what I call Film Festival-itis.

Film Festivals were invented in the 1930s and 1940s for local tourism & boosterism reasons (Cannes most obviously), became entrenched in the industry in the 1950s and more recently have spun out of control, numbering in the thousands and pretty much used for phony "snob appeal" in posters & trailers, using the familiar Cannes palm logo to surround the names of many idiotic and worthless events. About 25 years ago I came up with a theory that many of the "hottest" international auteurs were locked into the Fest circuit, simply because they had become the darlings of the two dozen or so most-prominent gatekeepers: the festival directors and programmers. Flash forward towards the present day and you can see how Von Trier and Tarantino spring boarded their careers (and critical acceptance, along with devoted fan bases) from key festival exposure. But for every lucky Lars or Quentin there are thousands of indie filmmakers whose movies are CONSUMED on the festival circuit -virtually their entire audience (apart from that bastard offspring, the "home viewer" addicted to Blu-Ray and DVDs) is at these phony events, with little or no subsequent theatrical exposure. Based on my recent study (using 2000 as a sample year), I estimate that roughly 90% of the indie films being made in the past decade or so have failed to find a theatrical distributor.

Back in the '80s it was a familiar group: Wenders, Greenaway, Akerman, Angelopoulos, de Oliveira, Ruiz, Tanner, Kaurismaki (and less so his brother Mika), Jarmusch, several Italians like Amelio, Tornatore and Salvatores (the second wave after Bellocchio & Bertolucci of the '60s), plus up & coming talents from exotic places like Taiwan, Iran and South Korea. What most had in common was a devotion to minimalism: the shot, the lonely landscape was pre-eminent. Film festival directors and cinema buffs are united in their devotion to such minimalist beauty, whether it be evident in the work of now-abandoned Miklos Jancso, or the best of Herzog.

With THE LIMITS OF CONTROL Jarmusch has made a film directly appealing to this film fest sensibility: it answers the pointless question: what new film would Greenaway, Akerman, Raul, Wim & Aki want to see? Such a clubby, insider approach to cinema may be rewarding if one is an amateur navel-gazer with no interest in the audience beyond a small circle of friends -perhaps (I dread) the future of "cinema/video" in a world where You Tube and MySpace are taken seriously. But to my mind this is a dead end, and a career-ending move by someone as talented as Jarmusch.

To a film buff, the obvious starting point for LIMITS OF CONTROL is Jean-Pierre Melville, whose LE SAMOURAI is the unequal-able quintessence of the loner genre. When the protagonist is lying on his bed in a lonely room, Jim fails to achieve the beauty of Melville's color drained cinematography and experimental simultaneous zoom in/dolly out surreal effects, and although Paz is a photogenic bedmate, he doesn't give poor Isaach any memorable motifs comparable to Alain Delon's wonderful pet parakeet in the apartment.

So Jim had Isaach wander around, looking cool in a series of Regis Philbin monochrome suit/shirt combos (casting Regis in the role would have elevated the film immensely for me, just as substituting Al Roker for Bill Murray in the original GROUNDHOG DAY would have made that one brilliant). In the very dull & sycophantic "making of" docu on the DVD Jim is explicit in his rant about the importance of repetition and his foolish claim that nothing is original, all stories have been done already, only variations are possible, but in the final product LIMITS OF CONTROL is way too close to Peter Greenaway's trademark approach to cinema. Copping out doesn't hide this fact. And the philosophical doggerel of his screenplay's dialog is as fatuous as Jim's telling remark in the docu that he is such an expert on music and film history, but what he DOESN'T know is what counts. Jim's apologist fans (the LAST thing he needs!) have already littered IMDb with comments on the zen-like nature of LIMITS, but its endlessly repeated guest star dialog is rather on the level of "Confucius say..." instead.

From an early supporter and fellow Ohioan, I say: it's time to pull your socks up Jim (to paraphrase my favorite Physics professor's Britishism tag line from college). One of my favorite filmmakers in the '60s when I was introduced to Underground Films every Friday & Saturday at midnight showings was George Kuchar, and he has maintained his amateurism for 40 years. I always preferred his funny, cute little story shorts to the bombastic pretentiousness of critical darlings like Michael Snow (see: WAVELENGTH) or Hollis Frampton (ZORN'S LEMMA). Jarmusch's sardonic humor bridges these two extremes of what used to be called the avant garde.

Jim, you've made the big time -you're almost in the pantheon of greats, so don't blow it by listening to the yes-men; you're better than that! Make a film Jean Renoir would be proud of -it's pointless to go down the abstract imagery road of Godfrey Reggio and Ron Fricke.