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The Limits of Control

The Limits of Control is a 2009 American film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch, starring Isaach de Bankolé as a solitary assassin, carrying out a job in Spain. Filming began in February 2008, and took place on location in Madrid, Seville and Almería, Spain. The film was distributed by Focus Features.[4] It received mixed reviews, and has a 42% rating on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes,[5] having been criticized for its slow pace and inaccessible dialogue while praising its beautiful cinematography and ambitious scope.

The Limits of Control
Promotional film poster
Directed byJim Jarmusch
Written byJim Jarmusch
Produced byStacey Smith
Gretchen McGowan
StarringIsaach de Bankolé
Paz de la Huerta
Tilda Swinton
Gael García Bernal
Bill Murray
Hiam Abbass
John Hurt
CinematographyChristopher Doyle
Edited byJay Rabinowitz
Music byBoris
Production
companies
Entertainment Farm
PointBlank Films
Distributed byFocus Features
Release date
  • May 1, 2009 (2009-05-01)
Running time
116 minutes[1][2]
CountryUnited States
LanguagesEnglish
Spanish
French
Japanese
Arabic
Box office$2 million[3]

Plot

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Lone Man admires Le violon by Juan Gris on his first visit to Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía right before meeting Violin.

In an airport, Lone Man is being instructed on his mission by Creole. The mission itself is left unstated and the instructions are cryptic, including such phrases as "Everything is subjective," "The universe has no center and no edges; reality is arbitrary," and "Use your imagination and your skills." After the meeting at the airport, he travels to Madrid and then on to Seville, meeting several people in cafés and on trains along the way.

Each meeting has the same pattern: he orders two espressos at a cafe and waits, his contact arrives and in Spanish asks, "You don't speak Spanish, right?" in different ways, to which he responds, "No." The contacts tell him about their individual interests such as molecules, art, or film, then the two of them exchange matchboxes. A code written on a small piece of paper is inside each matchbox, which Lone Man reads and then eats. These coded messages lead him to his next rendezvous.

He repeatedly encounters a woman who is always either completely nude or wearing only a transparent raincoat. She invites him to have sex with her but he declines, stating that he never has sex while he is working. One phrase that Creole, the man in the airport, tells him is repeated throughout the movie: "He who thinks he is bigger than the rest must go to the cemetery. There he will see what life really is: a handful of dirt." This phrase is sung in a peteneras[6] flamenco song in a club in Seville at one point in his journey.

In Almería, he is given a ride in a pickup truck - driven by a companion of the Mexican - on which the words La vida no vale nada ('life is worth nothing') are painted, a phrase Guitar says to him in Seville, and he is taken to Tabernas desert. There lies a fortified and heavily guarded compound. After observing the compound from afar, he somehow penetrates its defenses and waits for his target inside the target's office. The target asks how he got in, and he answers, "I used my imagination." After the assassination with a guitar string, he rides back to Madrid, where he locks away the suit he has worn throughout the movie and changes into a sweatsuit bearing the national flag of Cameroon. Before exiting the train station onto a crowded sidewalk he throws away his last matchbox.

Cast

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Production

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We deliberately tried to take away things that would be expected from the film. Which is the absolute opposite of the American way of approaching... "okay, what demographic, what do they want, what do they expect, give it to them." It was like, let's see, can we make an action film with no action in it? Can we make a narrative where the plot is just like a series of repeated variations on something? Can we have a film with characters that have no background, no past, no present, no name, we don't know what they represent, they're metaphorical? These are all the things that people expect, so we were trying to remove the things that they would expect, with the predictable results, in the United States, of not a whole lot of people being interested in the film. That's okay, you know, we thought it was successful experiment on our part.

Jim Jarmusch, The Wire [7]

Jarmusch had the first idea about "a very quiet, very centered criminal on some sort of mission" fifteen years prior to the release of the movie.[8] Writing started with an idea for an actor, a character and a place and the rest was filled in afterwards. Isaach de Bankolé was to play a quiet centred criminal in the Torres Blancas apartment tower that Jarmusch himself first visited in the 80s. The filming was started with only what Jarmusch calls 'a minimal map', a 25-page story. The dialogues were filled in the night before each scene was shot.[9] This was in fact the first of Jarmusch's films that took place entirely outside of the United States[8] and there were some plans for the filming locations beginning in Madrid, then taking train south to Seville and finally southeast to desert near the coastal town of Alméria.[9]

Jarmusch cites novels about a professional criminal called Parker written by Richard Stark as an inspiration and also mentions that he loves John Boorman’s 1967 film Point Blank which was based on those novels.[8] Jacques Rivette's films were also used as inspiration for the plot full of disorienting cryptic clues with no clear solution. The title The Limits of Control comes from an essay of the same name by William S. Burroughs, in which Jarmusch notes that he likes the double sense of: "Is it the limits to our own self-control? Or is it the limits to which they can control us, 'they' being whoever tries to inject some kind of reality over us?"[9] Jarmusch also employed the Oblique Strategies created by musician Brian Eno to reassure himself in the creative process, specifically the using phrases "Are these sections considered transitions?", "Emphasize repetitions.", and "Look closely at the most interesting details and amplify them," all of which were explicitly naming processes that they were doing during the filmmaking.[7]

Many small details in the film have personal significance for Jarmusch. He had received the 'Le Boxeur' matchboxes as a gift, first from musicologist Louis Sarno, then from Isaach de Bankolé. The black pickup truck with the words "La Vida No Vale Nada" written on its back was modeled after a truck owned by Joe Strummer of the Clash, who had lived for some time in the south of Spain and also appeared in Jarmusch's 1989 film Mystery Train.[9]

The aim of the film according to Jarmusch was to create an "action film with no action" and a "film with suspense but no drama". He states that the film has a rather cubist nature, is "interpretable in different ways, and they’re all valid," and that it is not his job to know what the film means.[9]

Soundtrack

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The soundtrack is created out of existing music selected by the director Jim Jarmusch. It includes drone-doom bands Boris and Sunn O))), adagio classical music as well as peteneras flamenco. For scenes where no suitable music could be found, Jarmusch's own band Bad Rabbit recorded new songs. The common characteristics of the used music are its overall slowness and rich musical landscape. Black Angel's "You on the Run" was even slowed down while maintaining the pitch to better fit the rest of the soundtrack. Music served as the inspiration for the atmosphere and editing of the film, the guitar that appears in the story should represent a guitar that was used in the 1920s by Manuel El Sevillano to record "Por Compasión: Malagueñas", lyrics from "El Que Se Tenga Por Grande" are referenced throughout the film.[6]

No.TitleArtistLength
1."Intro"Bad Rabbit0:13
2."Fuzzy Reactor"Boris with Michio Kurihara3:42
3."Saeta"La Macarena2:17
4."Sea Green Sea"Bad Rabbit4:11
5."Feedbacker" (TLOC Edit)Boris3:32
6."Por Compasión: Malagueñas"Manuel el Sevillano2:03
7."Farewell"Boris7:29
8."N.L.T."Sunn O))) & Boris3:46
9."El Que Se Tenga Por Grande"Carmen Linares3:21
10."Dawn"Bad Rabbit1:41
11."You on the Run"The Black Angels4:50
12."Omens and Portents 1: The Driver" (TLOC Edit)Earth and Bill Frisell2:44
13."El Que Se Tenga Por Grande"Talegón de Córdoba & Jorge Rodríguez Padilla3:54
14."Blood Swamp" (TLOC Edit)Sunn O))) & Boris4:33
15."Schubert, Adagio from String Quintet in C, D.956" (TLOC Edit)Ensemble Villa Musica5:16
16."Daft Punk Is Playing at My House"LCD Soundsystem5:15
17.Untitled (TLOC Edit)Boris1:04

References

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  1. ^ "The Limits of Control". Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 2011-02-22.
  2. ^ "The Limits of Control". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2011-02-22.
  3. ^ "The Limits of Control (2009)". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 2015-12-30.
  4. ^ Masters, Charles (February 2008). "Jarmusch and Murray reunite for road thriller". Reuters. Retrieved 2008-06-22.
  5. ^ "The Limits of Control (2009)". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2020-05-17.
  6. ^ a b Macaulay, Scott (2009-05-01). "Jim Jarmusch and the music of The Limits of Control". Focus Features. Archived from the original on 2010-09-12. Retrieved 2021-06-15.
  7. ^ a b Licht, Alan (November 2009). "Invisible Jukebox - Jim Jarmusch". The Wire. No. 309. ISSN 0952-0686. Archived from the original on 2015-09-11.
  8. ^ a b c Flynn, Bob (30 November 2009). "'The Limits of Control': Jim Jarmusch interview". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 4 December 2009. Retrieved 3 August 2021.
  9. ^ a b c d e Lim, Dennis (23 April 2009). "A Director Content to Wander On". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2009-04-26. Retrieved 2023-10-08.
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