Anton Corbijn
Control

THE REVIEW

I also watched the documentary film about Ian Curtis and Joy Division; it's titled Control, directed by Anton Corbijn.
I liked it.
A film shot in black and white, which describes more the state of mind of a sensitive and depression-prone young man than a biography, stuck in the dead-end mood of late 1970s Greater Manchester.
A dry narrative, with no concessions to lightness, that lays bare the birth of the post-punk aesthetic and the anxieties of a generation searching for an identity.
The film maintains the same tone throughout, with events that are all important and all insignificant (as they are in a young man's life).
Cultural education, illness, romantic relationships, friends, depression, up to the dramatic epilogue of Ian's death, are facts strung together in a story always oriented on the same horizon that seems to have no future.
The stages where Joy Division performs are small, as are the audiences; the houses consist of small rooms where everything is confined to intimacy; the streets are the narrow roads of English working-class residential neighborhoods, and open landscapes are rare experiences that pass quickly.
Ian's death is also the death of an impossible and uncontrolled love dream, at the mercy of inescapable depression, of a life made of sudden choices collapsing under the weight of the awareness of not being adult enough to stand alone and meet everyone's expectations.
The film's language is calm and claustrophobic, a caption to the tracks played by Joy Division, devoid of frills in cinematic storytelling, minimal and obsessive like the despair staged on Ian Curtis's stages.
Overall, very effective.