The Limits of Control

There are certainly a few areas where Jim Jarmusch's new movie can be deemed to be operating at the absolute limits of. Viewer patience for one. Paul Martin is left deeply wearied by this calamitous misfire from a gifted director.

Who is art for? The general populace? The well-heeled cultarati? Or is it solely for the artist themselves? Should the creator be left to toil away in their garret on a cultural elucidation of their personal obsessions, and then it is simply up to the public to decide whether they want to take a ride on that particular artist's vehicle of no compromise? And what happens when the artist already possesses a sizeable following - perhaps garnered through, ooh, let's say some well-received, stylishly idiosyncratic movies - and they then begin inflicting sluggishly unlovable fare upon their already-captive audience? Well, following on from 2005's hollow endurance test Broken Flowers, writer-director Jim Jarmusch attempts to come with an answer to that last question with The Limits of Control, a film which suggests its director is dead set on neglecting any of his previously-exhibited strengths, in favour of a creative existence conducted within the confines of his own posterior.

At the centre of the film is Ivorian actor Isaach De Bankolé, playing a mysterious individual (identified only as the 'Lone Man' in the closing credits) who is engaged to carry out some unspecified assignment. We first see him in an airport lounge, receiving some existential counsel from a sharp-suited contact (Alex Descas), relayed via the latter's equally nattily-dressed translator (Jean-François Stévenin). From here, De Bankolé commences upon a Spanish odyssey, journeying to Madrid, Seville, and then out into the rugged hills of Andalusia. En-route he encounters various eccentrics (Tilda Swinton, John Hurt and Gael García Bernal amongst them), each of whom apparently facilitates the next stage of his quest via the supply of match boxes containing tiny, encrypted notes. Once read, these mini-missives are unfailingly swallowed by De Bankolé's loner, and washed down with his favourite tipple of two cappuccinos.

The Limits of Control is a movie rife with intellectual pretensions. It delivers an interminable procession of objects, behaviours, and pronouncements – all of which could theoretically have some significance attached to them, but that are deliberately rendered in such obscure terms as to make any informed reading as great an impossibility as splitting the atom using a pair of scissors. The interactions between characters are sub-Lynchian exercises in arch weirdness, and the faint stabs at humour are pretty wretched (unless you are amused by our Lone Man being asked by everyone he meets whether he speaks Spanish. In the immensely unlikely event that that is the case, then you are going to be rolling in the aisles like a Smurf on laughing gas). The acting too is so mannered as to be less than engaging, with De Bankolé's own performance being of such inscrutable taciturnity as to bring to mind, of all people, Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator.

Abandoned without a story to follow or characters to give a stuff about, the audience are left free to ponder other matters. Such as why does Paz de la Huerta's character spend the whole film minus any clothing, aside from NHS specs, high heels and the transparent raincoat worn by Joanna Cassidy in Blade Runner? It is not all disastrous. Christopher Doyle's cinematography certainly cannot be faulted, with colour and imaginative choices of camera angle being utilised to create visual compositions that offer the interest and intrigue so sorely lacking in the narrative. And the shoegaze soundtrack from Japanese band Boris is neat enough, in a would be-Kevin Shields sort-of-a-way.

However such minor slivers of enjoyment are swept away in a tsunami of irritation when The Limits of Control finally lumbers to its deadeningly unsubtle finale. Without wanting to give too much away, Bill Murray crops up as a cynical, slimy, xenophobic American – an apparent embodiment of Western conservative capitalism. He is ambushed by De Bankolé's character, at whom he then blusters in terms so rigidly awkward and shallow as – for the first time in the film – to utterly betray Jarmusch's intentions. This confrontation would seem gauche if served up by a first-time film-maker, but from a director with thirty years experience under his belt it is staggeringly dunderheaded and feels like the emptiest of grandstanding. Further souring the taste left by this sequence is the fact that figures played by major movie stars Swinton, Hurt and Bernal have guided the Lone Man to this point - the inescapable subtext being that these noble showbiz people can light a path to show the little people how to save the world. It is the most simplistic cinematic route to global salvation since Superman flew round the world so fast that time went backwards, and nowhere near as much fun.

Rating on a scale of 5 seagulls following the trawler: 1
Release date: 11 December (UK)
Directed by: Jim Jarmusch
Screenplay by: Jim Jarmusch
Starring: Isaach De Bankolé, Paz de la Huerta, Tilda Swinton, John Hurt
Cert: 15
Running time: 116 minutes