The Limits of Control

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 think I can somehow imagine what Jarmusch was trying to deliver with this - some sort of an existentialistic feeling of being abandoned in this world, and how arts and music etc. reflect our world-view and life in general. May have worked in theory, but definitely not in practice. To me, Jim Jarmusches works are all about cutting the technical nonsense to the minimum, and replacing it with powerful inner depth, such as interesting and multileveled characters - this one seemed to be the other way around.

The whole thing smelt like new wave and Godard ten miles away, with the whole style, and all the references to it (for example the Spanish girl holding the gun to Bankolé's face was almost exact reference to Godard's Made in U.S.A.) - and I didn't like the scent of it one bit. It was superficial, and didn't evoke any feelings in me. It was like Jarmusch was trying to speak with a language that wasn't his own. And the whole anti-capitalist "black James Bond" theme came as just naive to me.

About the only things that left me a good taste in my mouth, was the feeling of loneliness and emptiness that it delivered, plus John Hurt's short appearance with his monologue with the Kaurismäki- reference. That's about it, and even the mood was almost ruined by the two-pence Neil Young that kept on howling on the back.

Never would have believed to say this about a Jarmusch movie, but it was a huge disappointment.

Why Jim Jarmush? Why? Why did you of all directors have to produce such a dud? Why couldn't you have passed on that burden to a director without your prowess or your imagination? I thought we had a good thing going here. You make awesome movies and I watch them. It's a virtually flawless system. But no. You had to go and make The Limits of Control, a painfully pointless and stagnant film with no plot, no purpose, and no emotion. It follows a lone man as he searches for... something. There's no telling what, as the film has no backstory. It really has no story for that matter. This nameless man travels Europe, meeting various people and having vague conversations about nothing with them, only to receive a matchbox with a piece of paper in it at the end of every conversation. The man then proceeds to eat the paper. Any synopsis I could write about this film will make no sense and, unfortunately, seeing the film won't clear anything up.

This is such an utterly pointless film. It is incredibly experimental to a Lynchian degree, but Lynch always wraps up his films with a point. His films have a sense of purpose and meaning, and they get somewhere. The Limits of Control does not. We begin and end the film equally confused as to what is going on at all. The film does have a intriguing auteur look to it, accompanied by a great soundtrack and overall eerie pacing. But these nice things can only care a plot less story so far. The visual quality of the film begins as something compelling to look at and to absorb, but slowly becomes a very boring excuse for art film style visuals.

I think what really irks me about this film is just how serious it takes itself, and how profound it thinks it is. The film is incredibly pretentious and every conversation and every long, drawn-out, pointless scene is more self-indulgent that the previous. The film wants you to believe that there is some greater meaning to what it is all saying, but it's all just the ramblings of a pretentious goof. This is a film that insults our intelligence, as it isn't difficult to see past the faux profundities to the self-important nonsense that this film really is.

And what's even worse is how much the film tries to lead you on. It is alright to begin a film with no real backstory, throwing us right in the middle of the action. The Ancient Greeks invented the idea in the first place calling it in medias res, so I have no opposition to that. What I'm not okay with is films that just go in circles, never resolving anything and never filling us in on necessary backstory, or helping us out with the story at all for that matter. This isn't a thinking film in which we have to decipher the clues we are given by the characters and the story. There are no clues and this is a completely braindead film that thinks it has a brain that is smarter than all of us. Well, it's wrong. It's not intelligent, just pretentious.

I think the one place I can find solace in my despair over how bad this film was is that it doesn't give the impression that Jim Jarmush has forgotten how to make movies. That is a thought I reserve for films that are just bad in every way. The Limits of Control is Jarmush trying something different and new, but just failing miserably. It's really no more than a failed experiment, and I hope Jarmush realizes this. I hope he doesn't feel like he succeeded in making The Limits of Control a progressive and compelling film that transcends all cinematic boundaries. I hope that he has enough sense to realize he dropped a stinking pretentious mess on us and that he will have to clean it up if he wants to gain back some respect.

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.