Film - Think

I hope the legend holds true that Corbijn jumped headlong into this project as a response to Winterbottom's almost comic reproduction of Joy Division's origins in 24 Hour Party People. Thinking of Control as a corrective, a memorial biopic delicately tailored by Corbijn's trademark sense of composition, grants it a sort of dignity many of its rock star biography predecessors lack.

Though at first glimpse Corbijn's cinematography is marked by a pace and precision that could refer to the ethereal poetry evoked by classic black and white composition such as in Bergman or Tarr (Corbijn's Macclesfield seemed an awful lot like Ramsay's Glasgow), it never strikes out in the direction of transcendence achieved by Van Sant's treatment of Kurt Cobain in Last Days. Rather, Corbijn's Curtis is posed as a product of his environment, and the film traces this cultural biography in methodical detail. Out of his financial difficulties, debilitating epilepsy treatments, and failed marriage, emerges a totally secular figure. Corbijn's Curtis is "the Stranger" and Jim Morrison rolled into one. The sense of Curtis' personal drama as an absurdist tragedy is only emboldened by the circumstances of his suicide. Corbijn does a sensitive job of tracking the deterioration of his various relationships, fascination with death, and his eventual submission to what Curtis must have considered an unbearable case of epilepsy. This abundance of personal issues seemed to trigger his unexpected suicide right before his first American tour, and in this final hour of his life we find him smoking cigarettes, watching Herzog's Stroszek on BBC 2, and giving Iggy Pop's "The Idiot" one more listen. This improbable, yet entirely true, set of references has always made Curtis' suicide more emblematic than other rock star deaths. One can easily imagine his thoughts at the end of Stroszek, in which Stroszek’s suicide gunshot is followed by close-up shots of an inexplicable series of clanging quarter-slot mechanical animals. The din is unbearable. When questioned about this odd sequence, Herzog mused: “It’s a very big metaphor...but a metaphor for what, I can’t tell you. But I know it is very big and it will stand the test of time.” Such musing becomes all the more haunting in the context of Curtis, eyes closing on a world more Kafka than anything else. And "The Idiot," born out of Iggy's and Bowie's early rehabilitation in Berlin, may have struck a chord of sympathy in Curtis, sunk under the weight of his own seemingly insurmountable afflictions. This collection of images and thoughts become a ready made monument to Curtis' quick life.

There are moments in the film that seem intent on contradicting a skeptical opinion of Curtis and his death. Immediately on the heels of the conversation in which Curtis tells his doting wife that he loves her no longer, the first few chords of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" begin to play. Is Corbijn's “timing that flawed” (as in, it is in unbearably cheesy moment in an otherwise sober film), or could the videographer in him just not resist such a perfect confluence of lyric, image, and biography? Either way, a few scenes like this may serve to give us the only sense of Curtis as “icon” that we actually have on film other than the well-worn videos on You Tube.