Director – Anton Corbijn – 2007 – UK – Cert. 15 – 122m
*****
UK release date 05/10/2007
The story of Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis: his disintegrating marriage, struggles with epilepsy and eventual suicide – review originally published in Third Way magazine, September 2007
For the uninitiated, post-punk Mancunian band Joy Division formed in 1977, then achieved near immediate cult status through Tony Wilson’s Granada TV show and Factory Records label. The four-piece band grew out of a three-piece (guitar, bass, drums) who Ian Curtis (Sam Riley from Widow Clicquot, Thomas Napper, 2023; Firebrand, Karim Ainouz, 2023; Byzantium, Neil Jordan, 2012) joined as singer and songwriter. The resultant recordings still resonate down the annals of rock: even today, songs such as (to name but three) Transmission, the eponymous She’s Lost Control and Love Will Tear Us Apart carry an undeniable charge.
Curtis took his life in May 1980 just prior to the band’s first scheduled American tour. His three survivors carried on under the moniker New Order to become incredibly successful; yet to this writer’s mind, their work pales beside those early Curtis / Joy Division songs. Quite simply, his work with the band has a focus, a power and a bleakness rare in rock. New Order didn’t play this early material live for 18 years after Curtis death.
Such history doesn’t really tell you what the film is like. Debut director Corbijn, credited as photographer on the sleeve of countless U2 and other albums, had planned to direct a feature which had no connection to music. But a series of meetings and a realisation of how seminal Joy Division were to his career – he moved to London from Holland after hearing them, then famously photographed the band in a tube station a month before Curtis’ suicide – changed his mind.
The script’s main source material is Curtis’ wife Deborah’s biography ‘Touching From A Distance’ – augmented somewhat to flesh out the character of Annik Honoré (Alexandra Maria Lara from Rush, Ron Howard, 2013; The Baader Meinhof Complex, Uli Edel, 2008; Downfall, Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004), the Belgian journalist with whom the singer embarked on an extra-martial affair.
Corbijn photographs his tale in stark black and white. Predictably, for one steeped in stills photography, his camera is content to let events play out before it. (He’s not the first director to come from this background: his most famous precedent, Stanley Kubrick, was a photojournalist.)
Which is not to say that events aren’t staged for the camera; scenes of the band performing prove compelling, as do little details like the repeating double aerosol can squirt punctuating the She’s Lost Control recording session and, more significantly perhaps, the ominous, ever-present ceiling airer (the instrument with which the protagonist will ultimately hang himself).
Performances are all top-notch, the piece being largely populated by then unknown actors, at least in terms of English language cinema, which helps give it the feeling you get looking at photographs of an unfamiliar band’s members on their album sleeve. (The one name exception is Sam Morton – from The Messenger, Oren Moverman, 2009; Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman, 2008; Minority Report, Steven Spielberg, 2002 – as Curtis’ wife.)
Indeed, although this is essentially a drama about a loner unable to cope with health and marriage falling apart, with Sam Riley commendably playing Curtis as an ordinary human being prone to attendant problems and contradictions, there’s a sense in which the process inevitably distils a cultural icon.
The only role the church plays in the tale of this talented if tormented individual is that of solemnising the marriage of a nineteen-year-old, which marriage is subsequently portrayed as one of several factors that destroyed him.
UK release date 05/10/2007.
Review originally published in Third Way magazine, September 2007.
Joy Division’s three albums Unknown Pleasures, Closer and Still were re-released on 17/09/2007 each with additional, previously unreleased live recordings. Control’s soundtrack, re-released on 1/10/2007, features Bowie, Roxy Music, Velvet Underground and The Killers among others.
Trailer: