Pretty and Careful

Rating: 7/10 (25 October 2007)

This biopic by famed photographer Anton Corbijn about the late Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division, looks sharp and is likely to please fans (it already has an 8.3 out of 10 on IMDb). Though ostensibly based on his widow's memoirs, it delves into many areas of the singer's life that she never gained access to, such as his life on the road and an intense love affair therein. CONTROL, unlike the Corbijn-directed music video for Joy Division's "Atmosphere," made 8 years after Ian's suicide, doesn't seem to want to push the myth of Ian Curtis further, but merely to photograph it. Corbijn, known for snapping some of the only photos of Joy Division, has said that he was a smitten, impressionable fanboy at the time--and this movie clearly grew out of that experience. It is as if the only way Corbijn could feel artistically in charge was to shape his actors in to veritable band members (the actors play and sing and dance Joy Division's songs themselves) and then simply photograph them like he would U2 or Miles Davis or, well, Joy Division. The effect is good-looking, but the movie isn't so much about the music, or the band playing it, as about Ian's troubled life off stage: epilepsy, booze and the consequences of an early marriage and fame. Due to a lack of pathos, the movie often seems to be merely glamorizing doom, and if we can't be there for the music, we are apparently supposed to be entertained by suffering.