 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
The Limits of Control
|
 |
|
There are many surprising affinities between Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control. Both films are located and shot in Europe, and
benefit from non-American finance. Many languages fill both films – and some of
their best moments involve problems of cross-cultural communication, from Brad
Pitt drawling “Buongiorno” to Isaach De Bankolé trying to order two separate espressos.
Both films are, very explicitly, fables about cinema
itself: Tarantino reaches for a grand Samuel Fuller-style metaphor, a film
exploding in righteous flames and taking all villains with it; while Jarmusch has his characters talk about the pleasure of
movies that let you quietly notice the details of everyday life – which is
exactly the film that he himself is making. (A contemporaneous American
meta-film trilogy opens up if we also include Michael Mann’s Public Enemies [2009] – or, at least,
its last and best half-hour.)
Both Inglourious Basterds and The
Limits of Control are about professional assassins, and both involve a
fleeting but powerful allusion to our contemporary period: Bankolé in Spain and the Basterds in occupied France are all
regarded as “terrorists” by the forces of evil conservatism: Bill Murray as a
Dick Cheney-like USA politician, Christoph Waltz as
the sadistic, scheming Nazi Colonel Landa. In this
subtext, Jarmusch is savvier: his black hero seems
stateless, whereas Tarantino’s white guys frequently recall rampaging soldiers
in Iraq or Afghanistan – or the torturers at Abu Ghraib.
And, finally, both films are about revenge. But it is
on this point that they truly part company.
For Tarantino, violent revenge has become his dominant
–perhaps his sole – subject. Jarmusch is more
circumspect. I have heard the story that, in the immediate wake of 11 September
2001, stricken with a bad conscience, he felt he could not proceed with a
violence-based project. Across Coffee and
Cigarettes (2003) and Broken Flowers (2005), he has deliberately
made his work lighter, more mundane, less spectacular.
Although The
Limits of Control returns to the Ghost
Dog-style figure of the steely, graceful hired killer (an amalgam of movie
types including Chow Yun-fat, Lee Marvin in Point
Blank [1968] and Alain Delon’s ‘samourai’ in Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 classic), this tai
chi exponent eschews even the use of a gun – and when he finally kills, he
accompanies it with the explanation that “revenge is useless”.
Although Jarmusch began in
the late 1970s and Tarantino materialised in the
early ’90s, they are similarly perceived by the filmgoing public as American intertextualists, true postmoderns who return to the heritage of Hollywood
classics – but filtered through the re-inventions of this heritage by
filmmakers in Europe and Asia.
Jarmusch takes a less familiar path than Tarantino, and risks losing some of his
faithful fans in the process. The Limits
of Control – a delicately stylised document of
architecture, light, everyday rituals – is far more like In Sylvia’s City (2007) than Point
Blank.
Indeed, in its strictly minimal plotting, the film
goes all the way back to Jarmusch’s first,
experimental feature Permanent Vacation (1980). Jacques Rivette appears to be a major
influence here: the Rivette of Paris nous appartient (1961), Duelle (1975) and Secret défense (1997), all recycled in a deliberately anachronistic
way.
Far from being a cutting-edge, cyber-age thriller, The Limits of Control – more radically than Wenders’ similarly motivated The End of Violence (1997) – is
a film without mobile phones and computers, without suspense and action.
Instead of guns there are guitars; instead of fights, flamenco.
There are certainly some generic elements – a naked femme fatale, an agent snatched in the
street, coded messages and diamonds transmitted via matchboxes – but these
elements are relativised, equalised;
betrayals and kidnappings register no more (or less) dramatically than Bankolé walking through the streets, or the many idle,
musing conversations with colourful strangers. And
when our hero wants to go “off-world” and quit the infernal cycle of this plot,
he simply throws away his matchbox and steps out into the daylight … (What a
fascinating double-bill this film makes with that other great, minimalist
cyber-thriller of the past decade, Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel [1998]!)
The Limits of Control does not display its
director at the top of his form. It is a bravely uncommercial and admirably ambitious film – but also rather thin and superficial. Unlike Dead Man (1995), the masterpiece that Jarmusch has yet to
match again, it is a work that gives up all its jewels on a single viewing.
But a specific, splendidly absent detail sets The Limits of Control directly against,
and above, Inglourious Basterds.
Tarantino’s code of violent action and suspense
expresses itself, above all, in a minute obsession with entrances and exits:
how his killers get into and out of a basement bar or movie theatre. Jarmusch’s lone samurai, however, needs only to calmly look
at a high-security, American military compound to instantly penetrate it: like
a phantom, he just appears inside its walls, and then just as instantly
escapes, disappears, flees.
Vengeance belongs to him – or whoever hired him – but
this revenge is, after all, useless: it solves nothing, changes nothing.
The Limits of Control may not be an
avant-garde masterpiece on par with Philippe Grandrieux’s Un lac (2008), but, in its gently
resistant way, it does offer us what Petr Král once called “a secret image of the world”.
MORE Jarmusch: Mystery Train, Ghost Dog, Night on Earth, The Dead Don’t Die © Adrian Martin August 2009 |
