Release Date - 5th October 2007
Starring - Sam Riley, Ian Curtis
Samanthan Morton, Deborah Curtis
Alexandra Maria Lara, Annik Honore
Joe Anderson, Hooky
James Anthony Pearson, Bernard Summers
Country- United Kingdom
Awards - Nominated for 2 BAFTAs (best supporting actress and best British Film), 25 other nominations and one one BAFTA (Most promising new comer) 20 other wins
The film is a biopic of the lead singer of the band joy division, Ian Curtis. It follows his life from his school years up to his suicide when he was 23 years old. Although the film was filmed in colour the director change it to balck and white 'to reflect the atmosphere of Joy Division and the mood of the era'. The director himself put in half of the 4.5 million Euros budget due to him being a huge Joy Division fan, often a photographer for them as well as filming the music video for the release of 'Atmosphere'. The film follows Ian as he grows up struggling against epilepsy and depression. The film starts with a conventional social realist film setting of a Macclesfield block of council flats and follows Ian go to the solitude of his room in which he plays and idealises himself to David Bowie, one of the producers behind the film. For Ian music, the solitude of his room and Poetry, for we see Ian resite Wordsworth, are his passion and serve for his escape from reality throughout the film and become a symbol of his struggle against his depression and his illness. As the film shows music a way in which Ian can escape his Marriage, a job and quite a dull lifestyle. The pressures of his marriage going downhill after marrying young, having a child, his feelings for both his wife and a Annik, and his affair with her, the growing popularity of Joy Division and his failing medication for epilepsy all push Ian too far and force him to commit suicide.
The mise en scene through the film is quite typical of many social realist films with scenes of council flats, terrace houses, pubs and the use of black and white film. The locations used, like that of 'This is England' where mainly Northern industrial like Macclesfield, Manchester and Nottingham.
The film's receiption was generally good guardian saying "the best film of the year: a tender, bleakly funny and superbly acted biopic of Curtis" and Robert Ebert saying "The extraordinary achievement of Control is that it works simultaneously as a musical biopic and the story of a life." Hook, the bassist of Joy Division, remarked that "Control is a hell of a lot more accurate than 24 Hour Party People. You can tell that Anton knew us, and he knew us well".
The film has a lot of visual symbols such as the at the very end when Ian Curtis is cremated the church within the shot and the smoke coming out is supposed to be a symbol and a noticeably referencing to the record company Factory Records that produced many great northern bands, including Joy Division.
