Anton Corbijn's film about the life, marriage, struggles, and eventual suicide of Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis, Control, screened in Sydney tonight (well, last night) as part of the Sydney Film Festival at Dendy Opera Quays.

Dae and I were in the back row, left corner. (I won't give you the whole story on why we got in so late, except to say that there were pancakes involved, and a lot of rain. As a result, I was sitting next to a woman who nodded her head and shook all the seats irritatingly with her body's movement every time a song came on - which was often. A mixed blessing.

The film reels had come from Cannes, where it had been showing at the film festival last month. The SFF organisers, upon opening the mailed package yesterday, had discovered that out of the four reels of the film, the third one was missing. Being all the way Down Under, there was no possibility of getting it flown in on time for the screening. But no panic! the festival representative told us as she introduced the film. A digital copy would be played in place of the missing reel, and while it was in a different aspect ratio and the transition was not precisely seamless, it wasn't such a huge distraction that it took much away from my experience of the film. Notice I didn't say 'enjoyment'. That would be too simplistic a word.)

Sam Riley is excellent in the pivotal role of Ian Curtis, and Samantha Morton plays his wife, Deborah Curtis. The cast also includes Craig Parkinson (as Tony Wilson) and Toby Kebbell (as Joy Division's manager, Rob Gretton); and portraying the other band members of Joy Division are Joe Anderson (as Peter Hook), Harry Treadaway (as Stephen Morris) and James Anthony Pearson (as Bernard Sumner).

Before going any further, I have to confess that what little I knew of Joy Division - the Manchester post-punk band that would, after Curtis' death, be renamed New Order - came mostly from watching Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People (2002). It was a wild, ironical, and very funny film centred on Tony Wilson and his legendary record label, Factory Records, which signed up the band. (Sam Reily, I've just discovered, actually had a role in 24 Hour Party People. He played The Fall's lead singer, Mark. E. Smith.) I enjoyed Winterbottom's film on its own quirky merits, but I also know music lovers far more knowledgeable than myself who disliked its irreverant portrayal of the Manchester scene of the late-1970s and early-1980s that would become so influential on music in the decades following.

In the first quarter of both Control and 24 Hour Party People, we see the same event that reputedly started it all: the Sex Pistols show at the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall on July 20, 1976. Tony Wilson and all the members of the future Joy Division, along with Deborah Curtis, were among those who attended the show and it left them - we are all aware - forever changed.

But what came before and, more crucially, after that scene in the two films is very different.


Control is filmed entirely in black and white, and the very last word anyone could use to describe it would be "irreverant". The camera is minutely sensitive and empathetic to Curtis' inner emotional landscape and makes every moment he's on screen - from the intimate, private scenes of Curtis alone in his room writing lyrics or listening to music, to the gigs where he stands alone and isolated above the audience pit - quietly, often excrutiatingly beautiful to watch.

But if this is a rather bleak film (and it is), the actors (Gretton especially) nevertheless provide us with many moments of wonderful dry humour, and there is no character who is less than fully real and alive. The only ones who seem to sense that they are playing out a potential tragedy are Curtis himself and Annik Honore - a Belgian woman whom he meets on tour and begins an affair with.

"I'm afraid," Annik says to Curtis, "afraid that I'll fall in love with you."

It's too late for that - for Annik and for us.



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While not wanting to ruin the somberness of the film, I absolutely HAVE to share this picture with you of Sam Riley, and a thought that occupied my mind for an embarrassing amount of the film's playing time:

SIRIUS BLACK, circa 1979?! SRSLY.