Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Isaach De Bankolé
Alex Descas
Jean-François Stévenin
John Hurt
Gael Garcia Bernal
Tilda Swinton
Billy Murray
Directed By:
Jim Jarmusch
One of the greatest heartbreak of my college years was the lack of life-altering revelations. I've discovered great writers and directors, but those I liked best beforehand are still those I like best today. I thrived on Philip K. Dick's fiction in high school and ended up making my master degree thesis on him. I would count the discovery of Haruki Murakami as a life-altering revelation if the hipsters wouldn't have yanked him away from me by claiming they brought him to America. One of the directors I loved before college and I still revere as a Pagan God today is Jim Jarmusch.
As Jarmusch can hold his own intellectually against the pedant European film elite, he's also clever enough to remember that cinema is a narrative art and refuses to torture his medium in the name of art, the way the likes of Jean-Luc Godard did. Jarmusch is responsible for my favorite movie Dead Man, a western epic and a tragedy, starring the ever dreamy Johnny Depp. You get the point, I fucking love the guy. His name only has a soothing effect on me. I popped The Limits Of Control into my DVD player with only one negative feeling. A little guilt that I hadn't seen it in theaters.
The storyline is typical Jarmusch. A lonely stranger (De Bankolé) receives an undisclosed mission from another nameless character played by Alex Descas. They speak with codes and secrecy in the way criminals do, but you have no idea what the mission is about. Jarmusch keeps you guessing by making the stranger interact with shady and paranoid looking people. The best one being a completely naked girl (Paz De La Huerta) who waits for the stranger in his hotel room. For the whole movie he keeps disarming her and refusing her advances. He keeps an Olympian cool around the naked beauty. I remember thinking: "For a shady operation...this is going pretty fucking well!"
But that's just how Jim Jarmusch is. He will deny your expectations, but will reward you with something else that will force you to think. I remember reading somewhere he wanted The Limits Of Control to be a film noir without any violence. His experiment is working because of the terrific mix of subtlety and clichés his actors work and because of Jim Jarmusch's patience. He leaves the characters in the frame for a long time, letting them soak in the atmosphere. Sometimes, he stretches scenes really thin and strips them of their meaning. For example that scene in the beginning where the strangers takes the plane and walks to his hotel room. The whole thing takes 10-15 minutes and brings nothing. It's just a pain to watch up to a certain point. Sure it reinforces the aura of loneliness around the stranger, but it's a little much.
Another annoying trait is the dialogs. They are minimalists, which I get, but they are also rehashing an old Dead Man joke ("Do you have any Tobacco?"), but without the great timing (which, really, made all the strenght of it). Repetition kinda kills the noir mood he tried to set up at the first place. The Limits Of Control is a riveting watch for Jarmuch fans because we know how to play his games, but I can see why casual art films fans were frustrated with it. It's an hermetically sealed movie that doesn't try to reach out. It's an experiment and at the same time a reflection on his career. I loved it, but I missed the sensitivity of Broken Flowers and the masculine introspection of Ghost Dog and Dead Man. Easily the most aesthetic-oriented Jarmusch movie.
SCORE: 80%
