Control (dir. Anton Corbijn)

If you achieved a legendary status in British music and then killed yourself aged twenty three, you probably wouldn’t want the person with most discernable input into the film of your life to be the wife you were cheating on at the time of your suicide.

Control, photographer Anton Corbijn’s new biopic of seminal Manchester post-punk band Joy Division’s lead singer Ian Curtis, is precisely that. It is based extensively on Ian Curtis’s widow’s book Touching From a Distance, while Curtis herself has an executive producer credit.

As a result, the focus of Control is very much on Ian Curtis, the private man, much more than Ian Curtis the singer/lyricist or Ian Curtis the member of Joy Division. There is a tension around this - Corbijn, after all, did meet and spend time with the band during its brief lifespan - but, time and time again, it is the personal and specifically the amatory path of Curtis’s life to which the film returns. It is central in a way that is at once both fascinating and frustrating.

Essentially, this is an incredibly powerful, bleak film about a depressed man having an affair and killing himself. That he was the lead singer of one of Britain’s most important bands seems almost incidental. Of course it isn’t. The band and their music do take up a significant proportion of the film. But compared to, say, 24-Hour Party People - Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 film about the late Tony Wilson, which included a significant section on Joy Division - it doesn’t display anything like the same passion for the music.

What is also curious is the way in which the film treats its central character. Sam Riley’s Ian Curtis is an astonishing performance, but it is a portrayal of enigmatic, withdrawn, unarticulated suffering. The net result is that Curtis seems virtually mute. As a consequence it feels as if we are only seeing the man to whom Deborah was married and never quite “reached” (if this film is anything to go by, Touching From a Distance is an excellent title for the book). Conversely, as Deborah is shown in the film to have been quite removed from Ian’s band life - an early scene shows her arriving at a bar while Ian is having a drink with the band, and him immediately shepherding her away from them - his relationship with the band is also one of moody silences and few words. Of course other accounts of the band’s life exist, and have obviously been taken into account.

Indeed there are some interesting comparisons to be made between the episodes treated in both Control and 24-Hour Party People: Tony Wilson signing Joy Division in his own blood, or the recording of She’s Lost Control (Control’s Ben Naylor is no comparison with Andy Serkis’s Martin Hannett from 24-HPP). Most interesting are the disparities depending on which people either film is trying to make look cool - it is interesting to note, for example, that when watching the Sex Pistols at the Free Trade Hall, in 24-HPP it is Wilson stood still with a look of inspiration illuminating his face; in Control it is Curtis.

Of course a perennial problem with the biopic is the temptation to make idiotically literal-minded comparisons of the “he doesn’t look much like...” school. That said, in spite of a fine performance, Sam Riley does occasionally seem like an odd choice to play Curtis. There is a passing physical similarity, but Curtis’s haunted pale blue eyes are replaced by Riley’s pair of smouldering Byronic near-black ones. Curtis’s stiff-limbed, spastic, epilepsy-inspired dances - which are still uncomfortable to watch even now - become something altogether more fluid in Riley’s hands, at times even oddly Bez-like.

The rest of the band vary: Harry Treadaway’s Stephen Morris is introverted and slightly pained; James Anthony Pearson fails to capture the young Bernard Sumner’s floppy-fringed dash - playing his guitar like someone who really needs to watch his fingers, keeping it strapped higher than any self-respecting guitarist ever would. On the other hand, Joe Anderson should have earned himself a lifelong place on Peter Hook’s Christmas card list bringing a spectacularly sexy, smouldering presence, piercing eyes and chiselled jawline to Hooky’s professional grumpy Manc persona. Oddly Anderson’s passing resemblance to Billy Boyd, coupled with Pearson’s not-dissimilarity to Dominic Monaghan, does lend the film version of the band a fleeting similarity to a bunch of hobbits. Samantha Morton turns in a characteristically committed, emotionally raw and honest performance as Curtis’s abandoned wife, making her at once wholly sympathetic, but also credibly flawed. It is tempting to describe the portrayal of Curtis’s Belgian lover Annik (Romanian actress Alexandra Maria Lara) as precisely the image that a betrayed wife has of her husband’s lover - she is beautiful, but thinly sketched - never fully allowed her own drive or impulses. She does, however, unwittingly deliver the film’s one knock-out gag.

The real star of the show, however, is Anton Corbijn’s cinematographer Martin Ruhe. Every frame looks like it could have just won a photography competition. The composition, the use of light, the observation of texture, is absolutely flawless. There are points where the artfulness takes over from any narrative drive and a beautifully lit shot of Sam Riley’s tear-stained cheek communicates more about Curtis’s isolation than any amount of voice-over ever could. Ranged against this, there are slight irritations: some of the dialogue clangs pretty badly; Love Will Tear Us Apart turns up as incidental music at exactly the point you expect it to, while Atmosphere’s appearance is perhaps even more predictable.

Stylistically, as Peter Bradshaw notes in his laudatory Guardian review last week, Control is almost an homage to Fifties kitchen sink British cinema and the French nouvelle vague. It certainly owes more to A Taste of Honey and Billy Liar than anything as crass as Oliver Stone’s The Doors, et al. It doesn’t ever quite manage to make the music hit you in the gut as hard as it might - although there are moments of spine-tingling beauty. What it offers instead is a bleak, harrowing and desperately sad story about someone who, for reasons known only to himself, decided not to make it past 23.
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Here's the She's Lost Control section from the film Control (with French subtitles), with the band recording in the studio cutting into a live performance. The dialogue at the end is between Tony Wilson and Deborah Curtis:



And here's pretty much the same bit as envisaged by Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People. If nothing else, the juxtapostion points up quite how wildly the two film's priorities differ - that said, searching these clips after the cinema last night, it was quite jarring to see anything like broad comedy after seeing Control:



And the real thing (imperfect sound quality):



OK, I’ve linked to this recording of Shadowplay before - but this YouTube clip has the original (unbelievably louche) Tony Wilson introduction, which is reproduced verbatim in the film - albeit before the (film) band go on to play Transmission.

As You Like It (dir. Kenneth Branagh)

However you look at it, this really is a terrible film: bad cinema, bad Shakespeare, bad everything. Over the past twenty years or so Kenneth Branagh has a made a selection of accessible, popular, well-made and generally enjoyable adaptations of Shakespeare for cinema. It is hard to guess what went so dreadfully wrong this time. Where the previous films were light, witty and textually acute (if a little over-fond of flashback and visual underlining) his As You Like It is turgid, unfunny and lazy.

The action of the play is relocated to 19th Century Japan for no readily discernable reason. This new location sheds absolutely no fresh light on the play, and indeed causes innumerable problems with the text. The Forest of Arden is still spoken of as a location in England and a majority of the cast are still English; a fact explained away in a brief pre-title gloss about how Japan was opening up to trade in the 19th century and many Brits made private fiefdoms there. It might have been more honest to explain that modern Japanese funding and markets suggested the location and leave it at that. Far sillier still is the re-imagining of Charles the Wrestler as a hulking Sumo champion, while retaining the line later that describes him as “sinewy”.

It is perhaps significant that Branagh himself does not appear in the film. His previous ventures have at least always been able to boast his very able central performances, even when some eccentric casting decisions (Keanu Reeves, anyone?) haven’t quite cut it. Without Branagh or his erstwhile leading lady, Emma Thompson, the cast appear a little at sea. Indeed, the film manages to make the usually excellent Adrian Lester (as Olivier de Boys) look inept, while relative newcomer Bryce Dallas Howard (Happy Days’s Richie Cunningham’s daughter, folks) makes a terrible fist of Rosalind. All the brilliant ambiguity of the play’s central romance between Orlando and Rosalind - who is dressed as Ganymede, who is “playing” Rosalind - is rendered incomprehensible by the fact that, pretty though she may be, no one could possibly imagine Ms Howard’s attempts on masculinity even faintly credible. David Oyelowo as Orlando gets around this by apparently not making a single decision about what his character thinks, remaining utterly, blankly unreadable. This might pass for enigmatic in some films, but with this many lines (even after the unsympathetic evisceration that the script has suffered) it simply doesn’t cut it. All the potential levity, playfulness and even, dare I say it, potential for an erotic frisson is reduced to a near-pantomime of simpering and gushing. Romola Garai as Celia fares slightly better, playing Rosalind’s cousin as a kind of kooky cross between Peaches Geldof and Ophelia. It’s an appealing enough performance and in a better production with competent direction might have worked well.

Brian Blessed as both exiled Duke Senior and his nasty brother Duke Frederick displays the full range of his abilities from SHOUTING with slicked-back hair (Duke Frederick) to talking very quietly while, curiously, dressed as Karl Marx (Duke Senior). Kevin Kline’s Touchstone is one of those performances in which an actor seeks to underline just how serious they (and their character) are by saying all their lines very. slowly. indeed. with. a. good. deal. of. thinking. in. between. each. word.

Beyond this, the cinematography is unbelievably bland. Even running the whole thing through Photoshop and upping the level of contrast would improve it severalfold. As it is, the characters frequently risk merging into the uniform leafy background. There is some nice use of tracking shots where whole scenes are followed by a single handheld camera, but even these have the feel of a good idea imperfectly executed more than a genuine achievement. It feels almost as if the film is trying desperately hard to iron out all the play’s wonderful strangeness and turn it into something more akin to Jane Austen in Japan. With a running time of 205 minutes and no possibility of escape, I really did try to enjoy this film, and wholly failed. Purgatorial. Avoid at all costs.



Here's the trailer, incidentally, which covers at least a few of the sins I've mentioned, and also serves to remind me just how godawful the soundtrack was.

On adaptations and liveness

I had intended to spend today’s entry thinking about comedy. It is my comedy reviews from Edinburgh that are still gazing mournfully up from my computer screen saying, “Hey, what’s wrong with us? Huh?” as I resolutely fail to polish them off and file them. Comedy is bloody hard to write about. The main problem is that it is largely composed of jokes. Jokes are based on some element of surprise. It is the unexpectedness of a punchline - the neatness of the observation - that makes an audience explode into laughter. Therefore, repeating them willy nilly to give some idea of what’s on offer isn’t really an option.

When discussing this dilemma with comics in Edinburgh they agreed, saying that they’d rather not have a single joke from their act repeated in reviews. At the same time, there is often precious little else to discuss. There’s frequently no plot, no characters, no set - there isn’t even lighting or sound very often. So, many of the things that compete for the theatre critic’s attention are removed. It is material and the delivery thereof that is key; and when the material is secret that’s a pretty hard write. There’s also the fact that I’ve not had much practice at comedy reviewing. Although from the dark mutterings about one particular comedy critic in Edinburgh, who shall remain nameless, concerning his apparent laziness in just repeating swathes of a comedian’s set in lieu of much actual review, perhaps inexperience may be just the thing required.

Anyway, I’ve been diverted. Andrew Field, in his latest blog article, attacks a piece by Marcel Berlins from the Guardian in which the latter confesses himself to be disturbed by theatres making adaptations of films. I do understand where Berlins is coming from. It’s not that I think theatre shouldn’t "do" film - Field skewers him on all sensible points on this score - but I do find the current slew of film adaptations surprising.

As I noted yesterday, The Cut has been fairly stuffed with adaptations of European cinema’s best-loved recent transvestite melodramas. Birmingham Rep/West Yorkshire Playhouse boast a forthcoming Emma "Kneehigh" Rice adaptation of Brief Encounter (incidentally, would anyone else describe Emma Rice as having a "lush romantic sensibility"?). Meanwhile, following the success of The Producers, the West End is awaiting the arrival of what feels like dozens of adaptations of films into musicals (to which Berlins does not object) with Broadway’s Hairspray (which has already been transformed back into a film) and Desperately Seeking Susan (turned into a Blondie jukebox musical) opening in the next month.

Granted, Brief Encounter was a film adaptation of Coward’s one-act stage play Still Life in the first place, which maybe legitimises attempts by theatre to reclaim it. But even so, I can’t help but feel a little underwhelmed at the prospect. For heaven’s sake, it’s Kneehigh: I’m not sure Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) will cope well with Mike Shepherd in his y-fronts. Moreover, you’ll note that Still Life and Brief Encounter are different titles. Some acknowledgement, perhaps, that the two items are different products. Berlins is correct to note that theatres, when doing these adaptations, do seem to retain the titles of the plundered artefacts for ease of advertising. After all, if you’re significantly adapting one work with the aim of making something new, shouldn’t you stick your neck out and call the new thing something, uh, new? Or is this the area in which the British finally get all European on an original text and claim some sort of auteur-ship in a way which, by and large, our directors don’t with text-based plays - e.g. Shakespeare - without the addition of "On...", "...Project", "Escaping..." or similar?

In passing, I find fascinating Berlins’s assertion that he doesn’t "object to plays made into films, of which there are thousands, many of them clearly better in their new guise." Which films is he thinking of? Almost without exception, every film that has been made from a play in the past decade has endured reviews which all contain the same chestnut "does not escape its theatrical roots" or some variation thereon - The Libertine, The History Boys, Closer, Some Voices, Mojo, etc. the list just goes on. The only unqualified success I can think of is The Madness of King George [III], and that’s going back a while.

As Field notes: "The original still exists... - Berlins talks as if they've made the Young Vic's version of All About My Mother from the dismembered remains of every print of Almodovar's original film." So why would anyone get antsy about an adaptation? Berlins does so because he thinks it’s not theatre’s job. This point is moot to say the least. Berlins is a (very fine) legal correspondent who happens to like a film and doesn’t want to see it spoiled. He then extends this anxiety well beyond its remit into a plea for theatres to produce more new writing, so it seems silly to engage with him on arguments about what theatre should "stand for". (Field, incidentally, estimates the National’s ratio of new to old plays at 10% new to 90% extant. I am reliably informed that the actual ratio is closer to 50-50).

But the point Berlins inadvertently raises - concerning cinema’s fixity versus theatre’s de facto fluidity - is a fascinating one. One of the only things of value that I found in the recent Roger Scruton book that I read for Culture Clash was his interesting observation that pop music was a medium defined by its fixity. Scruton doesn’t know enough about pop music to make this assertion stick (think of all those gigs, bootlegs, unreleased demos and cover versions before claiming that the pop song is defined by its existence in a single recording), but the fact that pop music, and similarly cinema, can offer something even suggesting a definitive article is a stark contrast with theatre (and by extension sheet music/folk music/opera etc. which only exist properly in performance).

Theatre’s own relationship with fixity is quite problematic. Chris Goode’s description (you’ll have to scroll down - the entry is "Straight back down, y'all, straight back down to earth", on Monday, May 28, 2007) of the technical set-up for Speed Death... in Plymouth is a good example:

'Like most machines, this machine has no intelligence within itself... There is something incredibly estranged about [its] experience. That radio that Gemma turns on in scene 7: that's the DSM, who can just about see and hear the performance, slightly anticipating the motion of Gemma's thumb and saying "Sound cue 18 [or whatever] -- Go!" to the sound operator, who is one floor up and listening to the DSM's voice on headphones, and cannot see and can barely hear the performance, and whose job it is then to press the button that launches the sound effect of the radio which then plays from a speaker in roughly the right area of the stage, at a pre-ordained volume level and for a pre-determined duration. This is what "she turns on the radio" now means.'

And Chris is pretty rigorous about this sort of thing. In Edinburgh one very popular Fringe First winning show I saw was I Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath. This consisted of an (un-mic-ed) actress performing in front of, and with, a video film playing on a giant screen that took up the whole back wall of the set. The acting also took place in the face of a loud barrage of pre-recorded sound over which she had to provide the voices for the on-screen actors herself. There was so much that took place on the screen, it often felt that the removal of the sole live element would not have deprived us of very much (even less if there had been a soundtrack). More significantly though, the actress could do nothing to interfere with the speed of the film. If she wanted to go faster, she couldn’t. If she wanted to pause for a laugh, she couldn’t or she would have been out of sync. Even in less extreme examples (the use of recorded music or voiceovers) theatre’s increasing use of technology - wonderful though it can be - is forever chipping away at the idea of liveness, and introducing fixed elements.

The obvious answer, and one to which many theatre-makers are increasingly turning, is to become a kind of "liveness" zealot. In extreme cases - and don’t get me wrong, it’s an aesthetic of which I’m very fond - this sees lighting and sound desks operated on stage, all lights visible and even foregrounded, and an explicit acknowledgement of the stage effects being employed. Even the National is very canny about having its musicians unobtrusively visible as they provide the live incidental music in the Olivier, although it tends to shy away radicalising the same option in the more conventional pros. arch Lyttleton and studio Cottesloe spaces. I’m not sure that it is absolutely necessary for everyone to adopt this approach to forestall the calcification of theatre as a live medium. After all, another growth branch in theatre is the ultra-technical show - think The Elephant Vanishes. There is room for all sorts of different approaches as long as those in control don’t lose sight of what’s important and accidentally create something from which the removal of all human involvement would make no significant difference.

Following yesterday’s brief excursion into my limited acquaintance with Godard, this discussion recalls another of his films: One Plus One - his film of the Rolling Stones recording Sympathy For the Devil intercut with footage of leftist militants - as a fixed article recording the gradual evolution and eventual fixing of another fixed article, all made to look as live and inventive as possible. It is an interesting second front to consider.



Finally, in an extraordinary attempt to make this look like a well thought out and tidy article, I’m currently listening to Love Songs You Can Dance To, the new album by The Popsocks - recorded pop music by Stefan Golaszewski, one quarter of the comedy sketch group Cowards. It’s not live, but it is very funny and sweet. And I'm not going to tell you any of the jokes.

Edit: Mark Shenton's Stage blog today offers an even broader context of how much new work this autumn is an adaptation.