[8] The Limits of Control

The limits of control

The limits of control



Yeah, let me see...ok. I need to gather my thoughts here...right...here we go...

This movie is intriguing from the off (something which is often immediately worrying for me) and the cinematography was so rich that I got to thinking (prematurely) that if the director was able to match these indulgent visuals with a good story that I might be watching a classic; on the other hand it was blatantly clear that an inability to produce such (a coherent storyline) would to render this tale nothing more than a plump golden turkey.

Our protagonist here is the intense and unusual looking Issach de Bankole from such movies as....

No offense meant to the good man but it is extremely hard to judge his performance here as travels through Madrid on some kind of 'mission' collecting little trinkets of information from scheduled rendezvous' with random oddities which populate his spy/assassin world. Each oddity offers up their philosophy segmented into easily digestible nuggets from the worlds of art and science in what can be only be described as some kind of attempt by Jarmusch at explaining the reasoning behind the groups target (whom we meet at the end in an almost pastiche like scene which concretes the movies daftness instead of supplying the much needed plausibility and gravitas that we had been waiting for).

Despite the movies failure to engage me in its unnecessary mystery though I was somewhat transfixed by the stunning photography and cinematography on offer here. The raw reds, greens and yellows which outline the rugged Spanish countryside are at once captivating, dreamlike and yet oddly relevant. However, the amount of detail in some of the (apparently innocuous) scenes sits a little uneasy with me as if the objective were to fill the time and space of the movie with image rather than substance. In one scene our protagonist is seen ascending the stairwell to his apartment yet we are treated to some oblique viewpoints as he does so?

Ultimately this movie falls into the odd but worth seeing category, a lesson to all budding filmmakers in terms of how to employ sight and sound (forgot to mention the also stunning audio here btw) to give your movie a rich and dense atmosphere and an equally good lesson to story tellers on what to avoid when trying to be mysterious.