Control Review

"Control" reviews

Movie

Control

Author

anonymous

Date reviewed

2007-09-28 14:40:14

Provider

Review

Few singers have been as deified as Joy Division's Ian Curtis, who, in 1980, at the height of his band's fame, hanged himself in the kitchen of his home. Curtis, a troubled man whose lyrics were awash with images of death and degradation, suffered from severe epilepsy and was sandwiched in a love triangle between his wife, Deborah, and Belgian girlfriend Annik.

Control is based on the former's book, Touching From A Distance, and is the work of Anton Corbijn, whose black and white photographs of Joy Division contributed to the group's mythology. As such, unusually for a rock biopic, Control rings true from the first frame to the last, helped by Sam Riley's performance as Curtis, who more than holds his own alongside the markedly more experienced Sam Morton, who is typically marvellous as Deborah.

Naturally, this being an Anton Corbijn film, it looks as superb as his photos of the band, his decision to shoot in black and white underscoring the

austerity of north-west England in the late Seventies. And while it is pretty much impossible to echo the brilliance of Joy Division live, Riley comes as close as is humanly possible in mimicking the Ian Curtis dance – a robotic, trance-like mass of bulging eyes and limbs that, tellingly, resembles an epileptic fit.

Less a film about rock'n'roll than the story of a man desperate to escape the suffocating confines of a gothic, smalltown life, Control is as beautiful as it is reverential, and a reminder of the power of one of the great vocalists.