Control yourself, man...

Jim Jarmusch’s new film The Limits of Control is an adulterated director’s film and, subsequently, a curate’s egg. But, by God, it’s a beautiful egg. One wonders, in fact, how the hell the movie would have turned out if the director of photography wasn’t the acclaimed Christopher Doyle.

The film is as tricksy and meandering as anything Jarmusch has ever done. Isaach De Bankolé plays the otherwise unnamed ‘Lone Man’, a walking enigma on a mission in modern-day Spain. It’s not clear what his mission is, or what exactly his meetings (in various locations, including Madrid, Seville, on a train and in the countryside) actually mean. The attendees are invariably starry, such as Tilda Swinton, John Hurt and Gael Garcia Bernal, all in various stages of ‘kookiness’. A typical rendezvous consists of swapping matchboxes, which tend to contain small notes inscribed with hand written messages. All messages are written in a mysterious code, made up of letters, numbers and symbols. During the journey he is tempted by sex, guns and mobile phones, but refuses all, in order to complete his job. His only indulgence is his repeated visits to an art gallery. It’s all very mysterious.

So mysterious, that for a pretty bulky film (it runs at a shade under two hours), there’s not a lot in it. There are repetitions, inversions, echoes and motifs which stretch across its length (much-repeated phrases and actions, the unfathomable use of the same incidental music numerous times). Its episodic narrative is akin to something from a Kakfa novel (where nothing is explicitly explained, it just happens, with these off-kilter ‘happenings’ straddling the line between the wry and the uncomfortable). The star names appear for only a couple of minutes each. Tilda Swinton probably makes the biggest impression, not least because of her unusual attire and character’s rather vocal penchant for old films.

And due to all this self-consciousness and repetition, it’s a slow, difficult watch. Even Jarmusch’s most ardent fans will probably find longeurs. The pill is considerably sweetened by the cinematography, which is crisp, colourful and precise. There’s some lovely images throughout, edited together beautifully. The use of cutting between objects and places featuring opposing geometric images is fun and playful; and also akin to something from an Eisenstein movie. This is one of the points where the lack of character development or a traditional narrative works wonders; the film’s intrinsic bagginess allows extended moments of this visual riffing. That said, the movie is still far too long.

That just leaves the question of what the film is actually about. Is it just an exercise in style and form? Or is the journey metaphor in the film (it begins in an airport, involves lots of waiting and ends with a trip in a car) of any significance? Certainly, the film begins with a philosophical quotation and continues in a chin-stroking vein, with much cod-intellectualizing throughout. Unfortunately Jarmusch’s wry crown does slip several times, and the movie falters and stalls into juvenile, ‘far-out’ existential discussions. All this leads you to wander indeed what, if anything, he is trying to say and, to some extent, what the point of it is.

The Limits of Control is a cool, glacial film full of intrigue and visual beauty. Ultimately it’s too detached and self-conscious to be anything else than an interesting experiment, and it’s certainly not a piece that stands up to Jarmusch’s best work.

Strike the pose

In the news last week: Tate Modern’s new exhibition, Pop Life: Art in a Material World, has run into trouble over one of the items on display: a nude photograph of Brooke Shields. Veteran Gary Gross took the picture when Shields was ten years old, and the work is presented as the basis of a room by Richard Prince. It is the first time Prince’s room has been displayed in the UK. And although the Tate insists they consulted with lawyers before deciding on the piece, the gallery has now decided to close the room, prompted by a visit from the Metropolitan police.

Naturally, this raises all kinds of questions involving censorship, decency and legality, but a more specific question is the treatment of the image in the confines of the exhibition. How we see something is at least partly decided by its context.

On the surface, and judging by its title, Pop Life: Art in a Material World is an exhibition concerned with the relationship between art and commerce in a society post-mechanical reproduction. We have Warhol wallpaper, a Keith Harring shop, Takashi Murakami as polymath pop-art producer.

However, really, the show is about both extremity and exploitation. There is exploitation of the artist as a self-made brand (Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Keith Harring), the artist exploiting the boundary between personal and private (Tracey Emin, Andrea Arnold) or the artist crawling along the borderline of taste (the Prince piece, or the photos of actors portraying Nazis). It’s about audacity and pushing boundaries, as well as being about the triumph of money over taste, and about the recycling of images for different means. The product is not as important as the image it projects. It’s the idea that matters, that sells.

In another exhibition, Prince’s work might be placed asuch so it would be judged on aesthetic value. Would this make much of a difference? In this exhibition it appears as an example of the treatment of celebrity, of how an artist treats, how he recycles, a pre-existing image. Is this its only merit as an artwork? Does this count it as cheap, shocking? Possibly not, if the image is strong and effective enough.

Ultimately, it’s one of those lines of questioning that is more important than any answers that will be delivered (which will almost probably be less than definitive). It asks how far it is acceptable to go. You can say all you want about censorship, taste and the law, but what is most interesting is that we are still discussing this issue in what is, according to the exhibition, a world where anything (be it Koon's erection, Emin's troubling childhood or images of actors as Nazis) can be bought, sold, changed, used and exploited.