Product Description

Acclaimed filmmaker Jim Jarmusch delivers a stylish and sexy new thriller about a mysterious loner (De Bankolé) who arrives in Spain with instructions to meet various strangers, each one a part of his dangerous mission. Featuring an all-star international cast that includes Isaach De Bankolé, Gael García Bernal, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton and Bill Murray, it’s a stunning journey in an exotic Spanish landscape that simmers with heat and suspense.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12256 in DVD
• Brand: Universal
• Released on: 2009-11-17
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, French, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.20 pounds
• Running time: 116 minutes

Amazon.com
Jim Jarmusch has been the cinema's deadpan poet of lives in transit, from his breakthrough feature Stranger Than Paradise (1984) to Broken Flowers (2005). Limits of Control pretty much consists of deadpan and transit as it follows--make that contemplates--the mission of an enigmatic hitman through some picturesque but sparsely populated corners of Spain. Whom this "Lone Man" (Isaach De Bankolé) is supposed to kill and why are matters not shared with the viewer. Neither is the content of the various minuscule messages Lone Man periodically receives, reads, then swallows. Presumably they cue the next stage of his itinerary, which includes encounters with John Hurt as a guitar-toting philosophe who disdains the word "bohemian," Tilda Swinton as a platinum-blonde-wigged femme fatale emulating Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai (and reminding us that that glorious movie made no sense either), and Pas de la Huerta as a young woman called, with incontrovertible aptness, "Nude." Throughout, De Bankolé's magnificent carven-ebony features register little, not even exasperation that every conversation begins with someone saying to Lone Man, "You don't speak Spanish, do you?"--in Spanish.

Most of the little that's said in Limits of Control is stuff like "Everything is subjective ... Reality is arbitrary ... Life is a handful of dust" (though that gets translated as "Life is a handful of dirt"). You've gathered by now that no way is this a thriller, although it teases against the outline of one. Its hipster self-consciousness includes name-dropping (Eliot, Rimbaud, Hitchcock; the title is from William Burroughs), homage (Citizen Kane, Contempt, De Chirico), and quite a bit of cutting from paintings to actual scenes that resemble them, and vice versa. It's all impeccably shot by Christopher Doyle, who knows just how to light De Bankolé and his dark monochrome outfits against dark monochrome backgrounds, and make us glad he does. Otherwise, Limits of Control pales in comparison to Jarmusch's other film centered on a taciturn black assassin, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), with Forest Whitaker. There the minimalist narrative took on an aura of ritual, devotion, and genuine mystery. The rituals being observed in Limits of Control feel empty and played out. --Richard T. Jameson

Customer Reviews

Minimalist's Noir; For Jarmusch Fans Only
I am not a big fan of Jim Jarmusch. I really liked two of his films, though - "Night on Earth" and "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai." The story was thin, but I really liked those fascinating characters he portrayed in them, especially Winona Ryder's taxi driver and Forest Whitaker's hitman. And the soundtrack is always unique.

In "Limits of Control" you meet "Lone Man," a mysterious unnamed man (played by Isaach De Bankolé), who is, it is suggested, about to do something criminal. The film is set in Spain and the man meets other mysterious characters, sometimes exchanges matchboxes, and continues to travel.

You may call Jarmusch's new film experimental. Or something like, "a mystery film without mystery" or perhaps a minimalist's noir. I like the idea itself. A certain film genre has a set of rules that have been repeated so long, and it is good to see those rules played out in an unexpected way, like some great European film directors such as Aki Kaurismäki.

Having said that, I must say the results of the cinematic experiments don't have to be boring. I know the film is not about story or characters, and I think I know some of the references to other films, but sorry, to me, quite honestly, "Limits of Control" was just dull. The cinematography by Christopher Doyle is certainly worth seeing, and it is good to see many familiar faces in Jim Jarmusch films (including Kudoh Yuki), but the film is strictly for avid Jim Jarmusch fans.

Haunting neo-noir
The Limits of Control
dir Jim Jarmusch 2009

5* Haunting neo-noir

I just saw a preview of this film last night, and ... wow. Very Jarmuschian, very Doyle'ish. Yes, legendary Wong Kar-Wai cinematographer Chris Doyle shot this, and it was an inspired fit. Visually, the film is beautiful as we tour Spain from the cities to the remote country, yet at the same time brooding and ominous.

Which was suitable, since the overall effect of this film is definitely noir. Mysterious goings on, presumably unlawful; suspenseful music; a morally ambiguous central character; the aforementioned brooding and ominous landscape; even a flamenco rehearsal reminiscent of the almost obligatory nightclub scenes in classic noir.

Structurally, the film is simple. A Lone Man (played with impeccable detachment by Isaach De Bankole') arrives in Madrid. He is contacted, given brief and cryptic instructions, and goes on to make the next contact. At each stage, he orders two espressos, "in separate cups", opens a matchbox to find a folded square of paper with a few numbers and letters on it (coordinates?), which he memorizes and destroys; he has some task such as "find the violin"; he hangs out for a while, always ordering two separate espressos, until he is contacted, given a pass phrase; has a few cryptic words and exchanges his matchbox for a new one, and sets off on the next phase. At each stage there is a small cast of sharply drawn characters, cameos really ... the flamenco performers; or a cafe waiter impatient with his habits; or the beautiful, naked, and seemingly very willing (though we're never sure just what game she's playing), young woman (Paz de la Huerta) who shows up in his hotel room. Few, if any, characters other than the Lone Man are here for more than a few minutes.

This structure seems like it should quickly get tedious, but instead the tension builds palpably. What, we wonder, is really going on, even as we are presented with a few clues. Why all the complex charades? Is this criminal, political, or...? Fortunately, we eventually do get to resolution of sorts, although a suitably ambiguous and head scratching one. I know I'm definitely looking forward to a chance to view this one again.

The limits of narrative - Jarmusch at his most opaque and fascinating
The Lone Man (Isaach de Bankolé, hard and cool and tough without ever doing much of anything) sits across from Creole and French. Creole speaks Spanish; he doesn't understand and French translates. He's to go to Madrid. They give him a book of matches. He goes to Madrid by airplane. There he meets several people and exchanges boxes of matches with them; he sits at an outdoor café and always order 2 espressos. When he meets Nude (Paz de la Huerta) she tries to seduce him, but she fails. Not while on the job. He wears a metallic blue suit and looks awesome; eventually he wears a metallic rust-brown suit and still looks awesome. Then he goes back to the blue. He is always queried: "You don't speak Spanish, do you?" He always replies "No" in English; his speech is accented, but where he's from, where anyone is from....no clues.

In each book of matches is a tiny piece of paper with cryptic symbols; the Lone Man reads it quickly and then eats it. He moves on, from person to person, sometimes given instructions verbally, sometimes not. He travels by train to Seville, there to pick up a guitar and give it to someone else; at one point, his box of matches is filled with diamonds. He is an agent - or a courier transporting stolen goods - a mafioso - we don't know. Eventually he moves out into an arid, scrubby, rural area. There is a big house, almost a fortress, that seems connected to the helicopters we see occasionally throughout the film. He meets someone to whom he does not deliver matches, and something else happens...

Jim Jarmusch continues in the parody or deconstruction of various action/macho genres that he started with in DEAD MAN (western) and continued with GHOST DOG (samurai & gangster film). This time, he's riffing on the cools 60s thrillers like John Boorman's POINT BLANK and some of Jean-Pierre Melville's films, as well as perhaps James Bond and the whole cold war spy thriller genre as popularized by John Le Carré. His style though seems more French New Wave than anything else - Jacques Rivette's sense of duration and often-imagined conspiracies along with the very light, playful dialogues punctuated by long silences; Chantal Akerman's something-about-nothing, drama built from absolutely nothing happening; Alain Resnais' precise visual textures. It's probably his least-funny film up to this point, his most ambiguous and challenging, the farthest he's gone from hitting any tones that would resonate with a conventional audience. No wonder it failed to get much of a release.

But for me, it's easily his best film since DEAD MAN. The growing disquiet and sense of something wrong - not with The Lone Man in particular, or anyone else in fact until the last person he encounters, in that fortress-bunker-mansion in the wilds - but a disquiet at the sense of aimlessness and purposelessness both of this character and of much of modern existence. Time spent in airports, on buses, in cars, walking here and there - but little time spent actually doing anything. The Lone Man remains always a cypher: he seems not to sleep, we see him in bed, always with his eyes open; he stays in expensive hotels, given the keys by various people on his journeys - how does he pay? where does he live?; he goes to museums and stares at Spanish Cubist paintings.

This is minimalist filmmaking, all right, a film that is full of gorgeous surfaces (courtesy of DP Christopher Doyle), sounds (Boris and others) and allusions to much of Jarmusch's earlier work, in particular DEAD MAN. The regular, rhyming repetition of the question about Spanish echoes the joke about tobacco, and indeed the use of match boxes provides another point of similarity. Like William Blake in the earlier film, The Lone Man does not seem to be part of this world, though unlike Blake he's aware of it and is traversing it for his own obscure reasons. And as that film is full of poetic allusions, THE LIMITS OF CONTROL features regular movie allusions, sometimes coming more or less out of nowhere - this in itself alluding in a way to the New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard in particular; as in the earlier film, the lead character seems completely ignorant of what everyone else is trying to tell him with these references. The whole film is a journey, but though we do end up with a climax of sorts it is deliberately, completely hollow, and we are left with more questions than we started with. The surfaces may be mirrors, or opacities from which very little can be pried without intense effort. Maybe there's nothing there, and maybe you'll think this is just a big pretentious, hipster Jim Jarmusch joke on you. Could be. But if you respond to it, you will enjoy wondering about that, being maddened by it.

An impossible, unfathomable, beautiful and endless film; among the 2 or 3 best new films I've seen in 2009, and easily something that I expect to improve and grow on me further with subsequent viewings.