pootling

I guess that Anton Corbijn’s control was never likely to be the cheeriest of films. Charting the brief rise and fall of Joy Division, and concentrating on the demise of their lead singer, Ian Curtis through suicide at 23 I guess that casting Adam Sandler and making it into a slapstick comedy probably wouldn’t have been true to the subject matter. That said, there’s little in this film one could call life-afirming. Mostly it tells the story of a man slipping into an abyss he’s been slowly crafting for years while his friends look on a believe that he’s doing it for the sake of art. He’s definitely not.

I think my main problem this films suffers from is what I shall call Biopic Syndrome. What I mean by this is, for example: Deborah Curtis shouts and screams at Ian and the camera pans down to the title on the notebook he’s been writing in. ‘She’s Lost Control’ it says, as though the music of Joy Division was nothing other than a faithful retelling of a few of the more depressing moments of Ian Curtis’ final years. Surely life’s not that simple is it? I can’t imagine that Curtis was listening to the radio, dance, dance dancing when he thought ‘ooh, radio: a live transmission if you will… I could write a song about this…’

On the other hand, it’s a beautiful looking film and you can tell that it’s been created by a man, Corbijn, whose first love was photography. Every shot looks like a gorgeous, perfectly lit frame, straight out of the pages of a 1970s or 80s edition of NME. And you can’t argue that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He was there through a lot of this stuff - it’s where he made his name - and he worked closely with Deborah Curtis and based a lot of the film on her rather extraordinary (auto-)biography, Touching From A Distance.

This film is both easy to watch, insofar as it is utterly beautiful, and it is almost impossible to watch because of its subject matter, but then swap the words ‘watch’ for ‘listen to’ and you’ve got a pretty good description of Joy Division themselves.