The 2007 bio-pic, “Control,” about the short but influential life of the English band Joy Division, didn’t get much theatrical play in this country, but it is well worth seeking out on the recently issued DVD.
Director Anton Corbijn has become famous for the moody photographs he’s made of rock groups and musicians over the past 30 years, including many sets of photos with U2.
Corbijn took shots of Joy Division in the late 1970s and one image in particular (right) — in which the only face visible is that of lead singer Ian Curtis — became iconic because it seemed to visualize the dark poetry of the Northern England band.
The band had a meteoric rise and fall due to Curtis’s medical and emotional problems. The singer-songwriter was diagnosed with epilepsy and when he would occasionally ignore the medication he was supposed to be taking, concerts were interrupted by his seizures (which, of course, only added to the performer’s doomed-poet aura).
As a result of photographer Corbijn’s decision to bring the story of Joy Division to the screen, “Control” is unusually interesting from a visual standpoint — each wide-screen black-and-white image is beautifully composed and characters are placed with immaculate preciseness within each shot.
Although the film is a mixed-bag in terms of drama — Ian Curtis died at the age of 23 and “Control” can only speculate about the forces that killed him — the production values are so stunning that you probably won’t mind the gaps in the narrative and the perhaps-too-enigmatic protagonist .
It might seem that the transition from still photography to directing movies is a logical step, but Corbijn’s debut with “Control” is one of the few notable forays of a lensman into movies since Bruce Weber switched from stills to filmmaking with “Broken Noses” and then “Let’s Get Lost” in quick succession in the late 1980s.
Movies have become so dominated by stars who demand a whole host of photographic concessions that it is unusual to see a film in which the images come first and the story and characters are secondary to the look of the piece. “Control” is truly a feast for the eyes.
