Sunday, June 21, 2009
Jim Jarmusch testing The Limits of Control
"The best of films are like dreams you don't know if you ever had." Tilda Swinton says in an albino wig and a trench coat that looks like it was stolen from the wardrobe department outfitting Hitchcock's 1930s films. Her comment is to the lone man played by Isaach De Bankolé in Jim Jarmusch's latest and in some ways most ambitious film The Limits of Control, but it could almost be taken as a kind of explanation to the audience for the journey they have been on with De Bankolé for at least a half hour or so. A journey begun with a Rimbaud quote in a world that was described by another briefing as where "reality is arbitrary."
I'm not certain that The Limits of Control is among the best of films, but it does strike that unique and lovely cinematic version of the phrase "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" which Beat figures like Burroughs and Gysin popularized from the tale of Hassan-i Sabbah, 11th century Persian mystic and missionary.
The loan man in Limits seems to get previews and clues of the encounters and matchboxes he will exchange from visiting art museums. As in a dream, repetitions occur and then the twist will pop out like an unexpected development by a jazz soloist. And it seems absolutely correct somehow that this all takes place in Spain, the land of surrealist grandfathers Dali and Bunuel. Jarmusch has this wonderful lovely way of identifying and hanging on to a few finite key elements and moving them around again and again in for new results. De Bankolé's clothing is used to such result. For most all of the film he is wearing one of three suits, each one determining another act or level in his journey.
The last image on the screen at the end of the titles states No Controls No Limits but there is a kind of irony to this because Jarmusch's films are so tightly controlled. Camera moves and placement of extras often add significance to his films. An interview with Jarmusch in Film Comment reveals there is a spontaneous component in the making of his films in which he does not use storyboards, develops dialog for a film with a 25 page script, sometimes overnight, but he clearly possesses a concept and a vision for what he is after. He knows the same way it is clear that De Bankolé's wants two separate cups of espresso, not a double coup.
If one has followed Jarmusch's cinematic excursions before, they will find the world of The Limits of Control similar to Bill Murray's in Broken Flowers or Johnny Depp's in Deadman. But Limits will probably have me revisiting his Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai to see some relationship with the rhythms and themes he uses in both films. Ghost Dog's Samurai code set him outside a gangster world. De Bankolé as the Loan Man also has a kind of existential relativity that moves him among a surrealist landscape with modern dress spaghetti western overtones.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:23 PM
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