"The Limits of Control"
(2009, Jim Jarmusch, USA)
Average Contributor Rating:

“The Limits of Control” has hardly had the best critical reaction. In fact, it has a downright negative one. It currently holds a thirty nine per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, meaning that less than half of the critics who reviewed the film liked it. What’s more, if you take a look at a few of the individual reviews, they haven’t just been bad, they’ve been awful. Google Rex Reed and this film’s title for my particular favourite, which doesn’t simply revile the film, but its director and his entire résumé. I guess, then, I’m already a little bit more likely to like this film than Reed, simply because I’m a fan of Jarmusch from what I’ve seen. Granted, that’s not exactly a whole oeuvre (in fact, I’ve only seen “Broken Flowers”, “Ghost Dog”, and “Stranger than Paradise”), but it’s enough to know that I’m partial to Jarmusch and his particular love for sound and visuals.

On to “the Limits of Control”, then, which has a simple, almost non-existent story line. A black assassin (Isaac de Bankole) wanders around the streets of Spain. He visits different art museums and stares at different paintings by different artists. He goes to various cafes, orders two espressos in separate cups (not a double espresso). He holds conversations with a set of contacts (which include Gael Garcia Bernal, Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, and Alex Descas), all of which start with the same line of dialogue, spoken in the nation’s language; “you don’t speak Spanish, do you?”. His intention is unclear until the finale, which remains equally as enigmatic as the rest of the film.

It’s easy to recount the strange goings on in Jarmusch’s latest film. In addition to the repeated events that I noted in the last paragraph, we have a naked Paz de la Huerta appearing at sporadic intervals, a white-wigged Tilda Swinton talking about Orson Welles’ “the Lady From Shanghai”, John Hurt mumbling about Spanish bohemians, and many other quite surreal events. Attempting to decipher the central mystery in “the Limits of Control” is, I think, a futile exercise. Why de Bankole’s assassin is attempting to hunt down Bill Murray’s unnamed character is never examined, hinted upon, or even mentioned, really. All we get is a series of match boxes, each holding a code which we are never told about, which de Bankole continues to eat in a “Ghost Dog”-esque manner. But, I guess, the very point of the film is that we aren’t supposed to know. The mystery is not what is important.

What is important, though, is Jarmusch’s style. I think your opinions on this film will pretty much rest upon your opinions of Jarmusch in general. If you like his style, this film is rife with it, and you’ll probably enjoy it. If you don’t like his style but appreciated some of his other films for their likeability, you will dislike this film, because it certainly isn’t an easy film to love. Yes, some scenes are quite arduous, and at times you find yourself asking what the bloody point is, but if you sit back and enjoy the ride there are some very lovely scenes and sequences. The meeting with John Hurt is a highlight, as is the one with Swinton, and the countless rendezvous with de la Huerta’s unclothed ‘femme fatale’ are darkly comic and eerily mysterious. Jarmusch’s love of sound and visuals are here, too, with the soundtrack being one of the very best things about the film. The director’s own band provided a lot of the music for the film, which probably says a lot about Jarmusch’s ability to match the music with what we see on screen.

Another reason why it’s important that we don’t actually find out who de Bankole’s assassin is, what he’s doing in Spain, or why he’s doing it is because it says a lot about the nature of film protagonists. I think one of Jarmusch’s main points is that we support de Bankole in his mission, even though we know next to nothing about him. The merry band of eccentrics that he meets could be just about anyone, from drug addicts to paedophiles, and yet we accept that the ‘Lone Man’ is our ‘hero’, and that Bill Murray’s ‘American’ is the villain of the piece. In truth, it could quite easily be the other way around, but our inability to question the nature of the characters in conventional Hollywood films is certainly something that Jarmusch targets in this film. Secondly, it’s a film about repetitions and variation. Certain shots, lines of dialogue, and quirks are constantly repeated time and time again, and although many will see this as tedious and arduous, it is in fact a clever and well measured comment on the nature of life, and how repetition and variation is a part of it.

Even without these themes (I’ve heard the film dismissed as pretentious babble a few times), the style and leisurely pace are other things to enjoy. In many ways, it’s a love letter to its lead actor, a love letter to art, a love letter to imagination, and certainly a love letter to the existential cinema of the 60s and 70s (it certainly calls to mind Godard and Antonioni, at least). You can pick out the subjects which Jarmusch quite obviously admires, and which quite obviously played a part in the film’s production. Many critics are calling it an elaborate in-joke against viewers, or a retentive film about nothing, but it is quite the opposite; Jarmusch’s latest is a provocative film that has a lot more love within it than its deadpan, almost stoic nature would suggest. . JB.