Film Review: Control (yes, the Joy Division movie)

November 1, 2007 by william alberque  Send to a Friend

Your faithful correspondent in Vienna does a lot of things for love of you, the reader. You’re not to know, of course, that most of the movies I’ve seen at the Viennale have started at 11 pm, and shown at the Gartenbaukino, which is the furthest theater from my apartment here, and that public transport shuts up shop early here, and that I have to be at work early every morning, bleary-eyed. Still, some things we do for money, and some for love. Movies, I pay money, to do reviews for love.

So, that said, it was with great anticipation that I got the cherry on top of my Viennale cake, with the showing of Control. In case you don’t know, Control is the eagerly-anticipated biopic of Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division, made from the book “Touching from a Distance,” written by his widow, Deborah.

I experienced this movie with tremendous trepidation. To say that I’m a Joy Division fan is a bit of an understatement.

Still I’m not (at least I don’t think I am) one of those sad Ian Curtis obsessives who wear trench coats and listen to Death in June records and collect every version of every white label, bootleg and acetate Curtis ever touched given half a chance. I just happen to adore the band, their music and most of their subsequent incarnations (well, okay, not
Revenge). I know quite a bit about the band, their history, and especially their mercurial producer, Martin Hannett. I advised a bit on 24-Hour Party People and I think I can say that there’s very little in the public sphere that I *don’t* know about the whole milieu, from Ian the man to Manchester.

Anton Corbijn directed this, his first film, after decades of rock photography, focusing principally on taking iconic photography of musicians and making shit music videos.

His name was principally associated with Depeche Mode, Echo and the Bunnymen and U2, though, if it’s high-contrast black and white on an album, you run a pretty high percentage chance of it being one of his. I always enjoyed his photography, at least, doing great work for Siouxsie, Elvis Costello, and a few amazing photographs of Joy Division. In 1988, in conjunction with a Factory Records release of Substance, a Joy Division retrospective, the label released a new single version of Atmosphere. Anton was tapped to do the video, and the result is one of the worst pieces of shit I have every witnessed in my life. Here, take a look:

The quality of the video, compared to that song, well, it’s just embarrassing. I swore upon first seeing it then that I would never forgive that fugly ucker for making such a mockery of one of my favorite songs of all time.

After seeing Control, I can say unreservedly that Anton, you are forgiven.

Even if you know nothing of Joy Division, even if you don’t really care very much about music, this movie is an incredibly moving and accurate portrait of its time and the despair of being too young and making the wrong choices and having no perspective on how to get through the hard times.

Just as a portrait of a stylish young lad, coming of age in the early 70s in a suburban town, it works. He falls in love, gets a job, does some drugs, forms a band, gets married, and then gets very, very sick. In a time before self-actualization and constant talking about one’s problems on telly, this is a cocktail for utter despair with no way out (to be fair, even today, even parts of that would be despair enough for anyone).

The movie in passing implies that Curtis’ dabbling with psychotropics might have contributed to his later epilepsy. It’s hard to say. What’s not hard to say is that Ian has his first grand mal seizure (they show Ian suffering an absence seizure at school - this is his first tonic-clonic) after forming the band, and then, having been prescribed a raft of drugs to control the disease, went on and off them and ignored the advice of his physio to take it easy - no drink, no drugs, plenty of sleep. By this point, he was bordering on full-fledged rock-stardom, and taking it easy was the last thing on his mind. It’s hard to imagine that there was a time when epilepsy was so misunderstood and medical science was still so shit. To think there are still diseases (schizophrenia comes to, er, mind) that are treated as poorly by the medical profession as epilepsy was in living memory is a terrible, terrible tragedy. Still, his boss at the work center has some sympathy for him, and he goes on.

In the meantime, Joy Division, with the publishing of their first album, “Unknown Pleasures,” had arrived. The tempo of gigs, especially on the continent, led to further temptations - and a rash decision to have a baby made the escape all-the-more alluring.

Curtis falls for Annik, a fanzine writer and translator for the Belgian Embassy in the Netherlands (I think), and though one feels this is a dalliance to distance himself from his increasingly estranged wife, he falls in love. We hear excerpts from his loveletters, and when his first suicide attempt follows, the devastating note inside to his wife is “give my love to Annik.” Tony Wilson, Factory Record empresario and subject of 24 Hour Party People, ignores the warning signs and presses on. Curtis sinks deeper into despair, Deborah stands up for herself, he is unable to choose, and the result is history. On May 23, 1980, the day before Joy Division’s departure for their first-ever U.S. tour, at the tender age of 23, Ian Curtis dies, leaving behind a widow and a one-year old daughter, Natalie (who by the sound of it in this article, is an amazing person:
http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,2173446,00.html).

As a story, it’s compellingly told - the acting is truly wonderful, the cinematography strongly communicates the mundane depression of suburban life near a burnt-out city, and writing is clear, honest and immediate.

There were so many times when the characters said things -or didn’t say things - exactly as I have in similar situations. I was awestruck that so much of this drama is played out in so many different lives, including mine. The difference, of course, being that I’m not an artist of consequence. Ian Curtis was, and that’s what adds another level of astonishment to my appreciation for this film.

The eye for detail is extraordinary. They even got his handwriting right. Sure, there are a lot - A LOT - of details left out.

Legendary anecdotes (watching the film, you’d never guess that Joy Division opened for the Buzzcocks on a tour and played practical jokes on each other all the time, would you?) are left out, details glossed over - but I understand these as necessary condensations in order to fit into the 2-hour running time. Still, I lived a whole year in that first 45 minutes (I looked at my watch astounded at that point that it had only been so short, yet been so fantastic). Part of the pacing of the film is that time goes by incredibly rapidly from 1973-1979. It’s that last year and a half that gets more than 90 minutes of screen
time. And that’s where the real drama is.

Still, the money shot for Joy Division fans is that Electric Circus gig

- with the real John Cooper Clark delivering “Evidently Chickentown” before Bernard Sumners’ still-odd imprecation “You all forget Rudolf Hess” (I know, he’d been in the news, but come on, Nazism is bad) and the band (then - still Warsaw) tear into their first of several live songs, “Leaders of Men,” performed with unnerving accuracy by the actors themselves. Every time I saw this group of young actors bust into another song, I thought I’d lose my rag. They were so perfect - every detail was so perfect. Corbijn was obviously working in every photograph, every TV still that’s etched into the memories of die-hard Joy Division fans. It was unnerving.

From the clothes to the sweat to the hair to the angles - he recreates so many moments that as fans we’ve seen immortalized that it feels more documentary than fiction.

“Digital,” “Transmission,” and “Disorder” stand out as truly astonishing recreations of the original. And thought it’s tangential, they pay passing reverence to Hannett’s influence, once with the spray can in “She’s Lost Control,” and then later in recording Ian’s vocals for the devastating “Isolation” (though, quibble, that was a terrible version of the song - his lyricssound nothing like that in their intonation - and for a movie that gets SO much right, it was a weird moment).

The Bury riot, another incredibly storied anecdote, seems more than a bit wrong. Alan Hempsall was not quite that mercenary, and actually the evening was already a Factory Records showcase, with both Simon Topping from A Certain Ratio and Alan from Crispy Ambulance subbing on vocals, and Ian sang at least three songs. Yes, a riot did end up kicking off, but that probably had more to do with them doing a 20-minute version of Sister Ray than anything else. What you see doesn’t come close to any of the eyewitness accounts I’ve read.  Another oddly false note.

Also, Alan didn’t look anything like that. This is probably what they were trying to do:

Even though this was what he looked like a month before the famous gig:

Stunning, though, that they use the actual love letters that Ian wrote to Annik. I thought she had sworn they would never come to light, and hearing his yearnings for her, while he was simultaneously telling Deborah he was breaking it off…well.

The scene in the street where he tells her he doesn’t love her anymore. Her decision to get a divorce. Her wearing that same damn dress again and again. The trapped look he gets at a dinner party with her friends. The obvious and painful failure of Annik to do anything more than pay a passive role with a front row seat to the destruction of a human being before her. The first suicide attempt (or is that the second? There were three total, only two in the film, the latter of which was crushingly successful) and Tony and Annik’s blithe treatment of the situation. The inevitable band meeting and Ian’s pathetic excuse. So much in this last reel of the film is devastating, and then the final scene -Curtis’ death has been described at length by many, even at the time - but it’s devastating to see it acted out. The sad desperation. And yet, I kept watching, hoping against hope that this wasn’t the ending, that it wasn’t inevitable after all.

But, it is.

And, I was barely able to look at anyone, anything after the film.

I walked out in a fog of sadness that someone with so much talent couldn’t see beyond the day and realize that it didn’t all have to go wrong. The spoken word version of “Twenty Four Hours” feels like a slap in the face, and the realization the band members must’ve had when they listened to the lyrics after it finally came out, two months after he’d died:

“Now that I’ve realised how it’s all gone wrong; Gotta find some therapy, this treatment takes too long. Deep in the heart of where sympathy held sway;Gotta find my destiny, before it gets too late.”

Control Opens tomorrow at E street. See it -Ed.

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