Control (2007)

Shadowplay: Sam Riley is Ian Curtis in Anton Corbijn's Control

Photographer Anton Corbijn's debut film Control manages to escape the conventions of biopics documenting the life and death of troubled rock stars. Possibly it is the fact that Corbijn is foremost not a filmmaker but a figure deeply established in the story he is narrating, having photographed Joy Division and directed one of their videos before Ian Curtis's death, that makes the film so moving and raw in its account.

Sam Riley's Curtis is persuasive and utterly heartbreaking. Troubled by emotional fragility and bouts of epilepsy, he is tortured by uncertainty, indecision, and the fact that life and its decisions are not defined by one clear right. He cannot bring himself to leave Debbie, the woman he fell in love with and married too young (Samantha Morton), nor can he resist the beautiful Belgian woman he loves yet hardly knows (Alexandra Maria Lara, Riley's real-life companion).

Aside from love tearing him apart, he is disillusioned by the pressure of the band's swelling fame. He longs for the simplicity of life before Joy Division's rise, a time when he could love without distortion - music, literature, his family.

Shot in black-and-white and with the aesthetic elegance that comes only from a photographer's eye, the film simply captures the heart and soul of Ian Curtis. It does not loiter around creating background or making clear the progression of the band's success or the events of Curtis's life. With these details disregarded, Corbijn has ample room to explore the human tragedy of the singer's life, resulting in a film heartbreaking and profound in its narrative.

The film closes at the cemetery with a lovely shot as the camera slowly pans up until it lies just above the rooftops and gazes lingeringly into a blank, grey sky. Joy Division's 'Atmosphere' continues throughout as we float above this worldly conception of death to something beyond, something as of yet undefined, and, most of all, something that holds great hope, creating a sense that the music Ian Curtis created with Joy Division transcends all the tragedy and pain, all the absurdity and gravity of mortal existence, both Curtis's and ours.

A Surrealist Fantasy about Reality

After trekking through a portal into John Malkovich’s brain, challenging the boundaries of self-reflexivity in Adaptation, and ultimately undergoing memory erasure in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, we end up in Charlie Kaufman’s latest cerebral romp, Synecdoche, New York.

Inspecting miniscule art or human existence?

Marking his directorial debut, Synecdoche offers Kaufman at his “Kaufman”-est, with no filters installed by Michel Gondry or Spike Jonze. The result is a film unrelenting in its complexity, persistently confusing, absurd, surreal, heartbreaking, and, above all, beautiful.

The film’s protagonist, playwright Caden Cotard (played brilliantly by Philip Seymour Hoffman), suffers fears regarding his mortality and the pressure of achieving something meaningful before dying. Earning a prestigious MacArthur theater grant, he finally gets his chance to create a massive play that will cement his legacy to the world.

Upon embarking on this task, however, his vision grows larger and larger until he abandons his old reality to live in the reality he created. He is living in a play about his life creating a play, and new characters are brought in to play old characters, leading to uncertainty over what is reality and what is his creation.

Rather than try to understand the physical complexities of the film, we should appreciate that Kaufman has crafted a reality that is simultaneously absurd and deeply poignant. He offers plentiful humor, usually in the form of nonchalant acceptances of painful truths many of us don’t like to acknowledge. However, even in the midst of such pessimistic realism, he presents beautifully understated moments of life’s simple grandeur.

Kaufman offers a philosophical view of reality, the world, and our human existence within both. Using his films as texts, one can delve into his view of human experience: that there simply are no solutions or explanations, no matter what we try to do to create one. Though this appears to be the track to despair or nihilism, within Kaufman’s narratives also lies an unbounded optimism in finding profundity in the everyday existence that connects us as a human race. His stories tend to end with a twist that lands the protagonists far from conventional happiness, yet manages to be oddly uplifting in its depiction of life’s many ironies – and this film is no exception.