Anton Corbijn's film biography of Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis, Control, is a passion play. It faithfully stops at all of the well-trod Stations of the Cross: Curtis listening to Aladdin Sane while putting on his sister's makeup at age 16; Curtis marrying his wife Deborah at 19; Curtis forming up with Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner, and Stephen Morris to become Warsaw, later Joy Division; Joy Division forcing Factory Records' honcho Tony Wilson to sign their contract in his own blood; Curtis suffering his first epileptic seizure on the car ride back from the band's London premier; Curtis falling in love with Annik Honoré and sabotaging his marriage; and, of course, Curtis watching Werner Herzog's Stroszek, listening to Iggy Pop's The Idiot, and hanging himself in his home the day before Joy Division were to embark on their first American tour. It is a story with limited permutations, as by the time Curtis' genius became widely acknowledged, he was already dead; only Deborah Curtis' memoir, Touching From a Distance (upon which Control is based) survives as a kind of comprehensive primary source.
Ian Curtis' life was a tragedy in the classic sense: his downfall a combination of his own indecisiveness, callousness, and callowness exacerbated by his epilepsy and the cornucopia of pharmaceuticals required to mitigate it. As Joy Division took off, he dealt with the psychic burdens of a home life increasingly out of step with his newfound success, as well as his body's inability to cope with the demands of his intense performances and burgeoning rock star lifestyle. That his art seemed to presage his demise lends both all the more resonance.
Corbijn's film meets Curtis on his own terms. There is an unfortunate tendency given Joy Division's considerable influence to over-intellectualize their music; what gets glossed over all too often is that amidst the sturm und drang, Joy Division were a couple of twenty year old guys in a rock band. They were adventurous, pretentious, and melodramatic in equal measure; Control seizes upon these elements, filtering Curtis' story through his own black and white lens. The film is self-consciously arty, each shot framed meticulously, each moment freighted with significance, all of it riding the great downward curve towards Curtis' impending doom. Yes, it's a linear recounting of facts well known to Joy Division obsessives - a sticking point for reviewers seemingly hoping for 24 Hour Party People Redux - but what seems to have gotten missed is how very peripheral most of those bullet points are in the film. In fact, though Corbijn is highly influenced by the band's aesthetic (an aesthetic he helped shape with his now-iconic photographs), his film is not an explainer of Joy Division's appeal, nor is it an investigation of its creative processes. Most of the movie takes place in the intimate spaces in between, where actors Sam Riley, Samantha Morton, and Alexandra Maria Lara are given free reign to create deeply human characters, as opposed to automatons simply recreating scenes famous and infamous from their subjects' lives.
The film's title refers to Ian Curtis' losing battle against his personal weakness, his increasingly bleak artistic trajectory, and his physical frailty. By the end of Control, he is shaking apart, futilely trying to reconcile his abdicated responsibilities as a father and a husband with the demands of being in Joy Division and his desire to be with Annik. Ultimately he could not, but nor could he bring himself to abandon one or the other; instead he abandoned himself. Corbijn presents Curtis' suicide at the age of 23 as both a fait accompli and a product of illogic and haste, soaked in whiskey and teenage theatrics, and we are left to wonder how an act so cosmically preordained could be so unpremeditated. Control declines to proffer any answers, and the myths are left to make themselves.
An interview with Anton Corbijn on WNYC's Soundcheck:
