Saturday, May 30, 2009

"The limits of control"

Jim Jarmusch is a 56-year-old man from Ohio, United States.



His mother was a reviewer of film and theatre for the Akron Beacon Journal before marrying his father, a businessman who worked for the B.F. Goodrich Company.
The middle of three children, Jarmusch was an avid reader in his youth, with an interest in literature encouraged by his grandmother.
He was introduced to the world of cinema by his mother, who would leave him at a local theatre to watch matinee double features such as “Attack of the Crab Monsters” and “Creature From the Black Lagoon” while she ran errands.

Now, of course, Jim Jarmusch is a filmmaker.

Yesterday, in the movie theatre of Solana Beach, that has the worst projection in the world, the latest film by Jim Jarmusch was seen.
Titled “The limits of control”.

In case you like Hollywood films, the advice is not to go and see “The limits of control”.
You might find that film boring and not making sense.

The story is about an African man that has come to Spain.
He is a hit man.
And has the assignment to kill an important person.
This he does successfully and next he returns to his ordinary life.

A story costing 50 cents.
However, Jim Jarmusch uses this story to tell something else.
“Reality is arbitrary” says one of the characters in the film.
And this is what the 2-hour film is all about.
The perception decides what the reality is.

Another character in the film, a Mexican, says that he is more interested in the reflection than in what is reflected.

When a filmmaker goes that way, the possibilities are limitless.
There is a detachment of what we all together consider as reality and we enter a new version of it.
The Jim Jarmusch reality.

Is that an interesting one?
Most of the time not.
Because it remains all within very reasonable boundaries.
Rarely does it become, illogic, abstract or surrealistic.
This explains why the film is in a regular US movie theatre.
It is a different and strange movie but not too much to be unable to be commercial.

So, the excitement is not coming too much from the pseudo reality Jarmusch is offering us.
It comes much more to simply BE in that extra reality.
It makes the spectator feel different.
Special.
Outside of the claws of society.

The film is the most impressive after it is finished and the moviegoer leaves the theatre.
The film is still too strong in the existence and for a while it feels to be in that Jarmusch reality while physically in today’s world.
A temporary cocoon.
Melting by the fumes of the passing cars.



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