It’s hard to know how to go about using words to do justice to Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, a film seemingly designed to reveal the folly of associating language with meaning, so concerned it is with the rhythm and atmosphere of code over courting traditional satisfaction by suggesting conceivable systems for breaking it. In talking about a picture in which everything is surface (or else nothing is), and the relationship between all signs and their meanings are scrambled (or none are), is everything a spoiler? (Or, perhaps nothing is?)
It’s possible that you’re frustrated already, and you wouldn’t be the only one; Jarmusch’s film is the first to be released this calendar year to truly polarize critics to the point where some of my colleagues have suggested that it’s one of the filmmaker’s worst efforts, while others champion it as one of his best. As such, it seems necessary to be more transparently subjective than usual: I like it. The Limits of Control seems to work best for those who can roll with the fact that Jarmusch is trafficking in vague genre promises that he only barely cashes in on, and that the story’s perceived mystery is a MacGuffin to pave the way for a rumination on creative idealism as a code that crosses transnational lines, bridging gaps of language and ethnic difference to unite dreamers/travelers (signified here as one and the same) in a common fight against those who seek to destroy their philosophy in the name of global capitalist homogeneity.
Jarmsuch regular Isaach De Bankole stars as a wandering operative known only as Lone Man, who is on some kind of mission involving handovers of matchboxes, sometimes containing diamonds, sometimes containing small bits of paper with inscrutable writing which the man appears to memorize before ritually swallowing and washing down with a gulp from one of the two espressos he always orders simultaneously. The codes seem to lead him to new locations, where he picks up more codes through cafe conversations about culture and art with charismatic strangers (the film features meaty cameo-sized roles for a variety of international indie bold faced names, including a bewigged Tilda Swinton, a be-bearded Gael Garcia Bernal, a bespectacled and mostly naked Paz De La Huerta, and a bewigged Bill Murray). Characters are never named on screen, but in the credits are refered to by their reductive defining characteristics: American (Murray), Mexican (Bernal), Nude (de la Huerta), Blonde (Swinton). Each person the Lone Man meets uses the same words to confirm that he doesn’t speak Spanish.
Clearly, it’s a film of pattern and repetition, increasingly forcing the viewer to question the nature of what we’re looking at and what it means every time the cycle repeats. He travels, he orders two espresso, he does tai chi, he wears a version of the same sharkskin suit, he reclines in his clothes but never seems to sleep. Perhaps because he’s ALWAYS asleep, because it’s all a dream? How would we know –– how would he know –– how to determine if he were sleeping or awake? As Tilda Swinton’s operative reminds him, “The best films are like dreams you’re never sure you really had.” In the already much-discussed climactic scene between De Bankole and a Cheney-esque Bill Murray, the latter growlingly demands to know how the former penetrated his ultra-high security lair. The answer: “I used my imagination.” It’s the one scene in the film in which something undeniably happens and yet, it’s debatable whether the scene itself is actually happening in real time and space at all.
The magic of Limits is that Jarmusch has used rigorous formalism (both within the narrative, and guiding it) to construct what feels like a loose, dreamy continuum of ideas. An inscrutable protagonist who literally feeds on encryption. A grafitied landscape of Spanish streets echoing the Cubist of paintings he visits at a museum, paintings themselves offering clues, delivering information in stylized form — art as its own kind of code, delivering sensitive information by disguising it in style. His contacts give him information, the building blocks of a crime, in the language of art appreciation. Or perhaps they merely appreciate the arts, and that’s their crime. The film’s climax implicitly suggests that if it is, the criminals will have their revenge against their oppressors.
Perhaps the key to what Jarmusch is up to is offered in a scene very early in the film, in which the Lone Man recieves instructions in an airport from a man referred to in the credits as Creole, whose Spanish is translated into English by a companion who makes it known that he thinks he should be decoding the crypto-philosophy he’s been charged with transmitting from one man to another. “Reality is arbitrary,” says the Spanish speaker. “You want me to translate that?” asks the translator. “I don’t fucking get it.” The Spanish simply speaker nods at the Lone Man, and says, “He gets it.”
Does he get it? Is he playing as though he gets it? Does it matter if he gets it? Do we have to get it? Is there a thing to get? The Limits of Control resists creating a discreet desire for the express purpose of satisfying it between credit sequences. If it satisfies you at all, it’s likely because of a desire you brought with you into the theater, one which the film doesn’t try to eliminate or even literally articulate as much as it sings of it. In code.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth