Control (2007)

Director: Anton Corbijn

To emit: Samantha Morton, Sam Riley, Alexandra Maria Lara, Toby Kebbell, Joe Anderson.

Execution time: 121 minutes

Days away from embarking on a long-awaited tour of the United States, Ian Curtis, the enigmatic singer of the band Joy Division, hanged himself on May 23, 1980 from a rope in the kitchen of his apartment. His suicide not only ended his promising young life, but also the dreams of a generation. Twenty-seven years after his death, he is still remembered.

Control, the winner of the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival is based on the 1996 autobiography “Touching From a Distance” by Ian’s widow, Deborah Curtis, the film follows Curtis’s life from his teens to his tragic death at the age of twenty. Three.

Ian Curtis (Sam Riley) worked at a job board until the sun went down, bringing his sci-fi dreams and imagery of the beat poet to life on stage. Curtis married young, to a local girl, Debbie (Samantha Morton), but fell in love with Annik (Alexandra Maria Lara), an intriguing woman from Belgium. His life was divided between these two beauties who inspired his most famous song, and combined with epilepsy and chronic stage fright that contributed to his suicide. Before he became epileptic himself, he witnessed a job seeker he was interviewing, and he suddenly had a major seizure. It is shown mainly from your point of view. It’s an important event to include, ‘She’s Lost Control’ wrote about it, although the misunderstanding about epilepsy is so widespread that it is feasible to expect some of the audience to go home thinking he ‘got it’.

Sam Riley is surprisingly good at conveying Curtis’s slow descent into hopelessness. Riley’s acting is restrained, never going overboard, not even towards the end. His portrayal of Ian Curtis, as an uninteresting person whose professional, personal, and romantic issues tore him apart from within, was done in a way that we might wonder where this actor has been all this time.

The cinematography is glorious in its stark, high contrast, black and white, the acting scenes feel realistic and genuine, and the director gets some powerful performances from every member of the cast. Not just a bio that seems to really capture the topic at hand, but also an excellent movie to side with any genre.