The Limits of Control: Highly Avant-Garde

Jim Jarmusch's new film, "The Limits of Control," is highly avant-garde. It does not obey the normal conventions of storytelling. Not for a minute. 

None of the actors play characters in the normal sense. Instead the actors enact scenarios that presumably are meant to convey something to the viewer.

As is always the case with avant-garde material, it is not obvious what Jarmusch is intending to convey. It's "open-ended," as artists frequently say. There are pieces of the puzzle left out so that the viewer must add something to construct meaning, if the viewer wishes there to be meaning. Almost everyone enjoys when a film puts the story aside for a few minutes to use cinematic techniques to express feelings or impressions. Nothing is more boring than a film that only focuses on plot advancement.

But when every moment of a film is non-narrative in nature, it can be tough for even the most intrepid cinephiles. Jarmusch and his producers of course know this, so they show impressive courage in financing a project that is so challenging. I am very glad there are filmmakers like Jarmusch still around and producers willing to give them money.

I cannot say that I found "The Limits of Control" endlessly fascinating, but I was enraptured by its hypnotic imagery during much of the playing time. Jarmusch here displays the visual power of a painter. (Several scenes, furthermore, take place in an art museum.) Everyone will surely interpret the film differently, but I saw it for the most part as a celebration of the avant-garde spirit itself. Art itself is what "The Limits of Control" seems to be about and seems concerned to protect and defend. The enemy would be the kind of person to insist that every movie be obvious (and controlled).

The figure we see on screen the most is a man in a suit (played by Isaach de Bankole) who is involved in some sort of conspiracy with other odd characters who speak slowly and enigmatically and wear unusual clothing. Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Gael Garcia Bernal, and several others play the co-conspirators. The man travels around France and Spain meeting these conspirators and receiving coded messages from them. Every time the man reads one of the messages, he eats the small piece of paper that it's on. This conveys a sense of secrecy and danger. The music is also quite effective in conveying danger. (Whenever the music got scary, I felt I was watching a David Lynch film. I'm fairly certain that Jarmusch was in love with Lynch's last film, the wildly avant-garde and scary "Inland Empire.")

Each of the conspirators is a fan of a different art form and chats with the man briefly about it. Tilda Swinton's "character" is a cinephile and announces how much she enjoys when characters in a film sit quietly and say nothing. She seems to be a stand-in for Jarmusch in this scene, one of the funniest and most self-referential in the film. Swinton is also at her magnetic best, decked out in a fabulous costume.

Eventually the goal of the conspiracy is revealed, so there is something of a plot. But nothing about the murder at the end appears real. It appears fake, so even it remains more symbolic than literal.

For a film like this to be most effective, its images have to take one's breath away in almost every scene. "The Limits of Control" didn't quite get to that level. Also the director has to hint from time to time about what he or she is thinking. It doesn't have to be obvious, but whispers of possible meaning have to be there. Jarmusch does this, but that's where he's at his worst actually. The actors say cliche existentialist slogans such as, "The universe has no center and no edges." A pick-up truck also has a nihilist slogan painted on the back, which I found crushingly clumsy. I felt as though Jarmusch had just read Samuel Beckett for the first time, which is a bit shocking given that Beckett's work is 50 years old. Artistic engagement with the concept of meaninglessness is at this point old hat. Offering regurgitated Beckett-isms (or epigrams from similar artists, such as William Burroughs) is hardly a step forward artistically. In fact it makes one seem painfully behind the times, as if one is frozen artistically in about 1965.

While "The Limits of Control" is not a major or truly original artistic statement, it at least keeps the tradition of avant-garde cinema alive. We certainly must thank Jarmusch for this. It also does have moments that explode with cinematic passion and dream-like wonder, which I for one never tire of.