Limits of Control
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
Runtime: 116 min.
Jarmusch has turned his own eccentricity into a brand, if not a style. He incorporates CGI as backdrop to Lone Man’s travels, but the basics still imitate Wim Wenders and Claire Denis, patron saints of hipster anomie. Denis’ muse, De Bankolé, does little more than act with his cheekbones.
Jarmusch expects viewers to be amused at Lone Man’s adventures in the void. It’s explicitly a bohemian thing as when characters discuss the meaning of the term bohemian or ponder whether or not “the universe has no center and no edges the world is a handful of dust.”Turning Spain into Edward Hopper–like voids—but adding hipster whimsy—becomes cloying.This super-cool fantasy of crime and subterfuge ignores quotidian truths that become Gotz Spielmann’s great subject in Revanche. And Jarmusch’s slow-metabolism filmmaking doesn’t relieve the doldrums.
The only moment of vigor is a flamenco performance of “El Que Se Tenga Por Grande” (a folk-art rendition of a Rimbaud verse), where guitarist Talegón De Córdoba, dancer La Truco and singer Jorge Rodriguez Padilla demonstrate genuine art and passion, the very things Jarmusch too proudly (or is it ineptly?) resists.
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