Beautiful Corbijn photography, but mediocre story line

Rating: 6/10 (13 October 2007)

I just saw this film the other night at the Mill Valley Film Festival and have mixed feelings about it.
First, its strongest point  the cinematography. The black-and-white photography on this film is top-notch, as one would expect from a film directed by an acclaimed photographer like Anton Corbijn. Although Corbijn is working with a d.p., Marin Ruhe, the look of the movie is clearly his, and the shots of people in relation to architecture, the angles, and the creative shots of light poles and other city features are all classic Corbijn. The biggest departure from Corbijn's signature look is that film doesn't go with the "overcooked" grainy look of his photographs.
But as for the quality of the storyline, what can I say  its a biopic. Which is a genre with a lot of limitations and one that is rarely spectacular. "Control" is no exception in this regard, telling a fairly linear tale of a tortured and self-destructive artist. Nothing much new here. Some of the use of musical cues are really ham-fisted, such as the scene where Curtis breaks it to his wife that he's no longer in love with her, which immediately segues into a montage built around "Love Will Tear Us Apart Again". (But considering that Corbijn is the same person who directed the visually evocative, yet schmaltzy video for "Atmosphere" back in the 80s, this isn't surprising.)
The film also makes for an interesting comparison with Michael Winterbottom's "24 Hour Party People", a very different movie that nonetheless is about many of the same characters and events. Given that Winterbottom's movie came out only 5 years earlier than "Control", many of the events in "Control" are quite familiar to the audience from the earlier movie, and its interesting to see how "Control" handles this. In several cases, such as the scene that shows the initial meeting of Tony Williams and Ian Curtis, the scenes play out more or less the same, but are shown from Curtis' point of view rather than Williams. In fact, the scene in which Williams signs a contract with Joy Division in his own blood is even included in "Control", even though this is apparently an apocryphal story that was made up for "24 Hour Party People".