The Limits of Control (2009, Spain/USA/Japan)

If Ghost Dog didn’t make it clear, Jim Jarmusch is pretty much obsessed with Le Samourai and the other gangster noirs of Jean-Pierre Melville. The Limits of Control takes all the markers of the gangster film – the stoic protagonist (who could possibly be more stoic than Issach De Bankole? I think the man changes expression precisely twice in 116 minutes), the shady dame, the secret messages, the empty city streets – and breaks them into the smallest pieces imaginable. Unfortunately, this structure ends up so attenuated that it's unable to support Jarmusch’s existential narrative, as the endless repetition of verbal and tactile cues starts to wind down the road to nowhere. There’s some good stuff here – I like how the majority of Control takes place in the sun-drenched streets of Spain, rather than midnight Paris or lonely L.A., and some of the monologues that De Bankole’s character solicits from his co-conspirators (including an awesomely-costumed Tilda Swinton, as well as John Hurt and Gael Garcia Bernal) are quite lovely. There’s also an exquisite flamenco sequence, so much so that it actually elicits a smile from De Bankole. But the film generally lacks the sense of humor and character that pull Ghost Dog and Dead Man out of monotony. With those elements reduced to nearly nothing, there’s not much else to do than sit back and watch Christopher Doyle’s gorgeous cinematography, which is aided by a Boris’ strong score. The material itself, at least in this form, might have been better served as a short film.