Control by Paul Bullock

Considering all the iconic Joy Division songs that could have been used as inspiration for the title of this masterful biopic of the groundbreaking Manchester band and late lead singer Ian Curtis, She’s Lost Control seems like a strange choice. Evocatively simple albums Unknown Pleasures and Closer would, perhaps, be more obvious, eloquent candidates. Songs Isolation, Atmosphere and the iconic Love Will Tear Us Apart would also look great sprawled across a poster, as would the poetic Touching From A Distance, the title of Curtis’s widow Deborah’s biography on which the film is based. Yet, none of these possibilities would correctly evoke the sadness of Anton Corbijn’s film quite as well as the monotone, tragically bland one it has.

This is because Control is one of the more unorthodox examples of its genre. Not a vibrant 24 Hour Party People-esque chronicle of how a musical movement can transform a city; a polished, Oscar-winning tale of personal transcendence through music like Walk the Line, or even a eulogy to musical self-destruction similar to Sid and Nancy, Control has more in common with a classic, traditionally British kitchen-sink drama. Think Saturday Night And Sunday Morning. Think This Sporting Life. Think the loneliness of the post-punk icon whose youthful zest and desire for escapism came back to haunt him in later life.

In reflecting this, debut screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh takes a bold risk by unusually splitting the film into two distinct parts. For the first forty-five minutes we have a whiz-bang set up of a youthful Curtis escaping Macclesfield’s grey cobbled streets through music and love. We first see him as a long-haired Bowieite clutching a copy of Aladdin Sane in his bedroom. Then he’s casually holding hands with Deborah (Samantha Morton, impressive in an underwritten role) behind her boyfriend‘s back. Then he’s into the Sex Pistols, daubing Hate on his overcoat. Then he’s proposing to Deborah on a picturesque Macclesfield hillside. Then he’s helped found Warsaw after meeting the other members at a gig. Then he’s asking Deborah to have his child. Then he and the now renamed Joy Division are on Granada Reports, wowing Tony Wilson with that iconic performance of Transmission. And then…

And then he hits the wall. About half-way through Control, Greenhalgh’s speedy script stops dead and Curtis’s life with it thanks to two momentous events. The first represents the first real strain on his relationship with Deborah: the birth of daughter Natalie. The second is the first time Curtis was presented with his own mortality: the death of an epileptic girl he once helped find work for in his job as a civil servant. These are the moments, Greenhalgh brilliantly has it, that Curtis Lost Control and for the second hour he plays out, almost in slow motion, Curtis’s life grinding to a halt and slipping from his grasp: the side-effects of his epilepsy medication dogging his health, the fallout from his affair with Annik Honore heaping guilt and regret on his already weighed-down shoulders and the riot at the Derby Hall intensifying his unease with fame and reminding him that his life was no longer just his own.

Suicide, the film suggests, is what Curtis did to regain that control. By now, we all know of the events of that night in May 1980: the attempted reconciliation with Deborah; the Stooges record playing on the turntable; the Werner Herzog film playing on his TV. Tony Wilson never did anything to play down the iconography of these details and nor did 24 Hour Party People which rather tastelessly dealt with Joy Division‘s role in the Factory story. However, Corbijn, who has been accused of accelerating the Cult of Curtis with his 1988 video for Atmosphere, does. Although every frame is so perfectly composed and beautifully lit it could be hung on your wall, the former photographer never does anything to glamorise the story or its tragic end. The iconic performance of Transmission is recorded with all the bland mediocrity of local TV and Curtis’s growing depression is shown in clean, clinical imagery, notably in the final scenes when he’s shot like a doomed fly looking at the Macclesfield sky through a spider’s web of telephone wires.

Curtis has always been one of the more difficult dead rock stars to bring to screen. Lacking the obvious iconography of Elvis and haunted, puppy dog looks of Kurt Cobain, he has a silent, every-day quality that is distinctly un-cinematic. However, Sam Riley, with his sunken eyes and bruised tenderness, does a miraculous job, perfectly capturing the anguish (and dancing) of the iconic singer. Joy Division as a whole don’t fare quite as well though. What inspired their music is never touched upon, and the other band members are offered only one dimension; Sumner the nice boy, Hooky the lairy one (“Don’t like the cocks part”, he says of The Buzzcocks) and poor old Stephen Morris once again just the bloke at the back who plays the drums. However, the actors do a good job at putting their innocent, youthful zest on screen, generating some gratefully received laughs in a film which is otherwise, quite rightly, bleak and oppressive.

Yet, there’s more than Curtis’s demise that will cause mournful reflection when watching Control. As Atmosphere shimmers its way through the cinema speakers during the film’s closing credits, pay particular attention to the names flickering over the screen like candles reaching the end of the wick: Ian Curtis, Rob Gretton, Martin Hannett, Tony Wilson, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris. All icons of Manchester culture who seem so young and alive on celluloid, now either long dead, recently deceased or closing decades of friendship with bitter disputes. Control is the story of these people who set in motion, over thirty years ago, a scene that would revitalise a city and write it into the history books. And if, as it seems, 2007 is set to be the year a chapter in that story closes, Control is a fitting tribute to their genius and tragedy.