I agree that Dead Man is one of his best films!
jarmusch is great with women. you named two good examples yourself: “mystery train” and “night on earth”.
in “ghost dog”, the little girl is brilliant. (i’m more interested to see her in a spinoff sequel than i am the little girl from “kill bill”! but maybe they can make a combo film out of it.)
“stranger in paradise”. another excellent example.
“coffee and cigarettes”. great use of women. i really like that film. i put it right up there with my favorite jarmusch films.
jarmusch is a great maestro of cinema. no problem at all working with women and making interesting characters out of them. granted, i haven’t seen his last two films. so i cant comment beyond this point.
Which little girl from Kill Bill? Beebee or Nikia?
The Limits of Control? It’s a drunken boat —hence the Rimbaud quote which opens it. I believe it’s Jarmusch’s first act of pure abandonment. By which I mean, he’s now free of his famous statement that
‘Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination…’
—the control (I think) is in him taking archetypes that have haunted him all along, and refining them, paring them down to singular, almost purely poetic meanings.
Interesting Elijah, so is that defending or just pointing out that cinema’s concept of women is that they are there as just pretty objects of desire and what they have to say matters nothing at all? Is Jarmusch simply continuing the objectification and belittlement of women or trying to comment on it? And, finally, what then are the meanings of the female characters in the film vis-a-vis the equivalent male characters?
OK on reflection— yes, he’s reducing elements. I need to watch it again. As I understand it, he’s playing chess with pieces/symbols that he names, and we’re the opponent.
Lone Man. Nude. Mexican. Guitar. Blonde. American. Molecules. French. Violin. etc.
The blankness to the nudity, and the women characters: again we’re down to a ‘stripped to the bone’ idea. It might be a failure to direct, or it might be a failure to act. But I’m reminded anyway of that old Freudian idea: that male and female, masculine and feminine principles, are polarized, and their desire is to unify. By its very nature, the consummation of any such desire is death, because the id/ego/superego trinity only functions when driven by desire. So unity with the other is a kind of death, a narrative death. Which is why romantic comedies all close with the long awaited kiss between thwarted lovers, and romantic tragedies… well, Romeo and Juliet must die.
In this film, Lone Man can have no reaction to the bared sex of a women, or the story (his story) will die. It’s more a comment on masculine linear drive than its feminine counterpoint, which is why the women characters seem somewhat redacted as personalities.
I doubt Jarmusch intends this interpretation. But that’s my point… this sheer impassivity… white space almost… it’s handing it all back to the audience… hence my idea about abandonment.
The Rimbaud quote is a key, I think, not a nicety.
As you move through the film, you find yourself alone, with no one at the helm.
These are the limits of control.
A game with no rules but those we imagine.
nikia from “kill bill”. maybe they can make a combo grindhouse movie out of the sequels!
nikia from “kill bill”. maybe they can make a combo grindhouse movie out of the sequels!
I can get down with the ideas that you present. I think that it’s a fine reading, especially extending it to the double title that Jarmusch includes: “The Limits of Control” at the beginning of the film, and “No Limits No Control” at the end. We begin grounded but by the end of the film the ground has been removed from beneath us. If the Lone Man begins as just another person with known physical interaction with the world, by the end he is an apparition, free from the limits of control that physics imposes on everyone else.
The point for me where Jarmusch falls apart here (and in Broken Flowers) is the fact that while he may be working with archetypes, the women are the ones who are forced to be characterless while the men have the freedom to give their own readings to these minor roles. None of the other male characters has a story that would make them different from the female characters so I can’t really get on board with the masculine linear drive vs. the feminine counterpoint—it’s not a good enough reason to exploit.
No Limits…. to the awfullness of this “film”. What a disgusting waste of human resources. How did anyone ever raise the money to make this trash nonsensical whatever you call it. He should be ashamed.
Okay, so what was so bad about it?
I wish I’d seen this… Que pobrecito.
I haven’t seen The Limits of Control, but I can say that Jarmusch is not todays Fritz Lang.
Yeah I’m not sure about the Lang comparison either. If the OP is simply referring to Lang’s exactitude then I suppose there is a meticulous impression one gets from watching Limits of Control, but that peculiarity could be said of many directors, past and present.
As far as Jarmusch’s apparent ineptitude in directing women, I’m not so sure about that either. True, there are fewer female roles in his films than male, but I think that’s chiefly a result of the type of films that he’s making. I’m sure he could’ve written in some female roles just to throw them in there as a kind of EOE thing, but why should he if it doesn’t fit? As previously mentioned, Gena Rowlands and Cate Blanchett (an actress I’m not especially fond of) had standout (if small) roles, so perhaps someday we’ll see a mostly female cast film by Jarmusch, but I wouldn’t call it a weakness or chink in his cinematic armour.
As for the film itself, it’s a signature Jarmusch piece that relies a little too heavily on his inclination towards visual poetry (to the point that narrative is slightly sacrificed), but overall I liked it. Jarmusch is an extremely inconsistent director IMO, so I was surprised at the solidity of this film. It was very focused and singular in its purpose and imagery, which was both its strength and weakness – though undeniably this monochromatic approach is not seen enough nowadays and I’m glad someone actually still has a vision.
The Mad Monk
After ruminating on The Limits of Control for a week now, I wanted to bring up some thoughts on the matter and see what you esteemed circle of cinephiles thought.
Fritz Lang was legendary for the amount of control that he required from his actors. A hand placed just right with the fingers positioned like so; a movement across the room without any deviation and a delivery of a line of dialogue repeated exactly each time. In this respect I see that Jarmusch is replicating his ideal. There have been streaks throughout all of his films of exactitude, some even to the detriment of his film as a whole. When it all gels, however, he is one of the best directors out there (Dead Man, Ghost Dog), but when his Ideas get in the way of the story, he has the potential to leave his audience stumped or even rejected. I feel that The Limits of Control falls more in this latter category than not. The last five minutes of the film makes the previous 110 almost completely worth sitting through (this is part of his greatness), but it could have been so much better had he set limits to his own directorial control.
Isaach de Bankole is a great actor for Jarmusch because he is able to empty himself and let Jarmusch fill him with who he needs to be for his roles (he was one of the most memorable parts of Ghost Dog for me), but not all of the actors that he chooses to work with are able to do this—in fact most aren’t (with the possible exception of the entire cast of Mystery Train, all of his films have some actors who bring their own variances to the roles). I would go so far as to argue that Jarmusch has problems with actresses (or female actors, if you prefer). He has been able to work with so many talented women, but save for a slight handful (and he already has a slight handful of actresses in his films to begin with—I don’t remember any in Ghost Dog or Dead Man [I’m beginning to see a pattern emerge]), most come across as vacuous or disingenuous. Tilda Swinton—one of my favorite modern actresses—gives possibly one of the worst performances of her career in Limits! Paz de la Huerta’s role is honestly downright misogynistic—all the more so that her nudity is only for the benefit of the audience and Jarmusch—, and both Youki Kudoh and Hiam Abbass are there just to move the plot along. Before you argue that these characters are supposed to be empty and that their disinterest is just part of the covert dealings, may I give you examples John Hurt and Gael Garcia Bernal? They both, too, have the same exact roles as Swinton, Kudoh and Abbass, but where the women were staged and forced, Hurt and Bernal made these exchanges completely their own. Hurt has made some amazing cameos in films (The Proposition, for one) and this is yet another. Bernal has the same charisma and attraction that he has exhibited since Amores Perros. Why, then, do the women fare poorly?
Night on Earth had strong female leads, but it also had Gena Rowlands who even made something out of her nothing part in The Notebook; Coffee and Cigarettes was hit and miss, but Jarmusch was able to let Cate Blanchett loose and that is one of the most memorable sections of that film; Down By Law barely has screen time for Ellen Barkin; and I would argue that everyone in Broken Flowers is pretty deplorable.
Ah, yes. And then there’s Ghost Dog and Dead Man. Hands down his best films and nary a significant woman character in sight. Can he just not direct women or does he inadvertently force them to submit to more exactitude than their male counterparts? Swinton has had a career of making nothing parts into glorious revelries of ingenuity, yet she crashes and burns here faster than Chief Engeneer Olson approaching Vulcan! I cannot reconcile these things because were it not for these four women Limits would have been better than good. It would be a modern folk tale of sorts, following in the lineage of GD and DM, but as it is, the best thing that I can say about the film is that Jay Rabinowitz continues to prove himself as one of the best film and sound editors working. I await the next Jarmusch film now with reservations in hand, and that is unfortunate.
(As an aside, is it just me or has the stature of Christopher Doyle as cinematographer extraordinaire plummeted since his breakup with wkw? perhaps that’s another topic for another post.)