The Limits of Control

Throughout his long career (almost 30 years) Jim Jarmusch has continually reasserted himself as this country's finest filmmaker. Each of his films have been a regeneration of his idiosyncratic and obsessive vision, and no one has painted a portrait of urban and national geography quite like Jarmusch. Like most great American art, this vision has been in the form of a quest. From James Fenimore Cooper's captivity narratives to John Ford's Western films, American art has traced the lines of the quest and hunt in both physical and moral terms. Occasionally, this quest has been subverted to show the hollowness and madness of America's violent obsessions. Herman Melville's Moby Dick is, of course, the great standard of subversion. Released in 1851, amidst violent territorial expansion and a headlong course to Civil War, its message was largely ignored before resonating with European intellectuals in the 1930s, as fascism descended upon Spain and Germany. Jarmusch's work is as relevant to his own time as Melville's was to his; amidst the Reagan Revolution and revival of the Wall Street ethos, Jarmusch released Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and Down By Law (1986). Amidst the culture wars, he offered the poetic Dead Man (1995) and Ghost Dog (1999).

The Limits of Control (2009), which opened at the Angelica last spring, starred Isaach De Bankole, Paz de la Huerta, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, Youki Kudoh, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Bill Murray. De Bankole is excellent as the mysterious and meticulous Lone Man in Spain who is met by a various ensemble of mysterious international characters who each greet him with the same line “You don’t speak Spanish, do you?” De la Huerta, as the Nude girl, delivered one of the most subtle performances in the film; though everyone is an enigma, her character exudes more emotion than anyone else and yet keeps the most hidden as well (quite remarkable given her bared state throughout the film). The comparisons to Jean-Pierre Melville and John Boorman are obvious, but the film is far more than an existential homage to Le Samouri or Ponit Blank: Jarmusch has again reinvented himself by flooding the screen in Sevillian color and light and a seemingly disjointed soundtrack by Japanese noise band Boris. But this reinvention also represents a return to the same obsessive quest that has marked all of his movies; The Limits of Control, strangely, is most similar to Jarmusch's student film Permanent Vacation (1980), also about a mysterious loner who encounters mysterious characters as he wanders around burnt-out New York City. Though filmed with different budgets, each utilized brilliant location shooting to etch a portrait of time and place and memory through the eyes of a wandering stranger.