Friday
15May2009
Movie Review - 'The Limits of Control'
Friday, May 15, 2009 at 1:06AM | The Limits of Control
Starring Isaach De Bankolé, Tilda Swinton, and Paz de la Huerta  |
The Limits of Control is, more than anything, appropriately named. It will test nearly anyone's impulse to get up and walk out. To say the latest film from Jim Jarmusch methodical is to misdiagnose what he's doing, because methodical implies that there is some method at work.
Jarmusch will never be mistaken for Michael Bay; his movies are idiosyncratic, small, and ocassionally maddening. However, I have seen and enjoyed some of them in the past. That's a luxury, because Jarmusch isn't primarily interested in creating an entertainment, and it seems in this case to have never entered his mind.
The Limits of Control details a man on a job (Isaach De Bankolé). What he is up to eventually becomes plain, but we suspect all along that it's not, say, missionary work. He flies to Spain, where he is instructed to go to a cafe, hang out for a couple of days, and wait until he sees the violin. At the cafe, the hit man orders two espressos served in two separate cups. He orders the same thing maybe eight or ten times in the film. The solemn, well-dressed man says little and expresses less, even when a completely nude woman shows up in his hotel room for sex, which he refuses.
Returning to the cafe, a man with a violin begins what we hope is a revealing exchange by asking the solitary man in the nice suit if he speaks Spanish. Then there's a pointless monologue that reveals nothing about the story or the man on a job with the naked girl in his hotel room. Following that self-indulgence, the characters exchange matchboxes. Inside the matchbox given to the nameless man is a coded message. He digests the message and then digests the paper it's written on, washing it down with one of his two espressos.
This same scenario is repeated multiple times, with Tilda Swinton, Gael Garcia Bernal, and John Hurt among those delivering disconnected monologues and passing matchboxes with this unknown and and unknowable man.
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