Anton Corbijn (2007)
Because Control was much praised, I spent much of the time trying to work out what I was missing in finding it so bad. This account of the short life of the Joy Division singer Ian Curtis has many of the clichés of a musical biopic but one cliché is conspicuous by its absence: the highs and lows of the performer’s attainment of and struggle with success and celebrity. There are no highs in Control, only lows. Did the director Anton Corbijn and the screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh want to suggest the film that Curtis might have made of his own life – monochrome in more ways than one, stylish to look at, gloomy at heart? Did they want to show that biopic-makers are inevitably constrained by a price-of-fame template and the extent to which that gets in the way of individualising the protagonist? If they were trying to do either of those things, you’d have to question if it was worth doing (particularly the latter: plenty of biopics have demonstrated the intrinsic challenges of the genre without setting out explicitly to do so). But I don’t honestly think that they were. I suspect that Control is meant to be taken straight: an admiring portrait both of its main character and of his desperately loyal wife Deborah, on whose book Greenhalgh’s screenplay is based and who gets a producing credit.
The irony is that, if the life together of Ian and Debbie Curtis was anything like the film suggests, it wasn’t like in the movies and the narrative of Control needn’t have been so conventional. They married in 1975, when he was nineteen and she a year younger. You’d expect from biopic conventions that Ian would be tempted into other relationships as soon as he began going places. Yet we’re given to understand that, although he seems unhappy living with Debbie, and dismayed by her lack of desire to go anywhere in life outside their home town of Macclesfield, Ian is a one-woman man until a Belgian girl called Annik Honoré looms into view (which she does emphatically: at the first glimpse of her in the audience at a Joy Division gig we can see she’s got her sights set on the main man). Ian’s affair with Annik (played uninterestingly by Alexandra Maria Lara) is presented as the dramatic centre and climax of Control largely because it seems to have been Curtis’s only extra-marital liaison – in spite of the temptations that must have been available to a boy who married young and suddenly and then became well known, and who seems never to have been caught smiling in the company of his wife subsequent to their wedding photograph.
The affair with Annik is world-shattering to Debbie and Control might have been a better film if she’d been the main character and if her hard-to-shift desire to stay an ordinary wife and mother against the odds had been treated as a subject for black comedy. Samantha Morton, who plays Debbie, is by miles the strongest performer in the cast (although she looks too old – she was thirty when she made Control: the period covered in the story took Debbie from sixteen to her early twenties). It’s a further irony that Corbijn and Greenhalgh may have treated Debbie respectfully because the real Mrs Curtis was so much involved in the project but succeed in making her a fool anyway, in spite of Samantha Morton’s skill and empathy. At a work colleague’s flat-warming party, Debbie is asked if she worries about Ian being unfaithful when he’s away with the band and the possibility hasn’t occurred to her. Soon after, as the couple walk home one evening, Ian tells Debbie that if she wanted to sleep with other men that would be OK by him. Appalled, she replies, ‘What a funny thing to say … when you say things like that it makes me think you don’t love me any more’. He then comes back with ‘I don’t think I do love you any more’. Rather than be devastated by his brutal candour or think Ian may have been sleeping around, Debbie assumes there is a single new love in Ian’s life. She launches into the standard screen routine of going frantically through her husband’s possessions to uncover a clue: sure enough, she eventually finds an LP with Annik’s name on it. (To complete the careless improbability of all this, Corbijn then lets Morton, when Debbie accuses Ian, pronounce Annik’s surname correctly, complete with acute accent on the ‘e’.)
Annik is a part-time music journalist and subsidises her wages with a job at the Belgian embassy. I quite liked the way this chimed with Ian’s continuing with his office job at the local employment exchange beyond the point at which he’s making a go of singing. (In one of the film’s most economically effective sequences, we see him walking along the street – first from the front in a shirt and tie, then from the back with ‘Hate’ in big letters on his jacket. He enters an employment exchange: we assume he’s out of work but then we see him at his desk job there.) We understand that he gives up the white- collar work after his boss tells Ian he doesn’t think he can combine it with the out of hours job with Joy Division but Annik evidently sticks with her embassy work to the bitter end: in an impassioned phone conversation with Ian late on in the film, she sits at a desk with a formal portrait of a Belgian diplomat or royalty or something on the wall of the office. There’s a good deal in Control that should have been played for laughs. When she first interviews Joy Division for the fanzine she writes for, Annik asks them questions like ‘Do you believe in love?’ When, later on, she and Ian have a serious heart to heart, she kicks off with ‘I’ve never felt this way before … yet I feel I don’t really know you’, then asks questions like ‘What is your favourite movie?’ and ‘What is your favourite colour?’ It would give this deadly solemn film a shot in the arm if Ian took this opportunity to remind Annik that she’s coming out with the same crap now as she did the first time she talked with the band.
Control starts in ‘Macclesfield, 1973’ but it’s not clear – if you don’t already know Curtis’s biography – how much time is passing after that. I regained my bearings only when Ian mentions having gone to see Apocalypse Now at the cinema: this can have been only a few months before his suicide in May 1980, on the eve of Joy Division’s departure for their first American tour. Curtis was notorious for his frenetic physicality on stage: he suffered from epilepsy and occasionally fitted during a performance so that the epilepsy seemed almost self-induced. Not surprisingly, Corbijn includes as many of these incidents as possible so that they come across as foreshadowings of Curtis’s self-destruction. (The effect is rather similar to Edith Piaf’s stage appearances in La vie en rose, which always seemed to occur at traumatic moments: the performer never seemed to get to the end of the song without collapsing.) The bits of voiceover from his poetry and diaries establish Curtis’s bleak outlook on life but the film left me unsure as to whether he was depressive. Sam Riley, who plays him, looks consistently fed up but doesn’t get much deeper than that. He may be a better actor than he’s allowed to be here – you sense a respectful tentativeness on the part of Riley and Corbijn: Curtis, only twenty-three when he hanged himself, has not only the sacred glamour of premature death but also, because the stuff he wrote was so grim, the authority of a telling-it-like-it-really-is seer. As things get worse, Ian muses about love getting broken as if he’d been happy once: I must have missed that bit. I didn’t know much about Curtis beyond ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and how he died. I’d had enough of his saturnine gloom long before the end of Control. I’m afraid I grew impatient for him to top himself.
In what appears to be an attempt to present Macclesfield as a spiritual condition, Ian’s parents are amiably uninterested in whatever their son’s doing. The boys in the band seem disconnected from one another and, if this is intentional, I couldn’t understand why. James Anthony Pearson is likeable as Bernard Sumner; the other two – Joe Anderson (as Peter Hook) and Harry Treadaway (Stephen Morris) – barely register. When Ian brings Annik along with him on trips with the band, it reminds you that none of its other members seems to have a girlfriend. Control gives a very predictable account of how the businessmen around Ian Curtis exploit their asset (there’s also an implication, when Curtis goes straight from a stay in hospital into a stage performance, that the audience are consumers too). Watching Toby Kebbell’s relentlessly crude portrait of the band’s manager Rob Gretton makes you wish you were watching Paddy Considine doing the same character in 24 Hour Party People; then again, watching Craig Parkinson’s better-judged Tony Wilson makes you relieved you’re not being subjected to Steve Coogan as Wilson in the Michael Winterbottom film. (Wilson, who also gets a producing credit, died shortly after Control screened at Cannes and before its UK release.)
3 December 2010
