Guest Author - Barbara Rice DeShong, PhD.
What is your response when you’ve paid to go to a movie, bought your popcorn and Coke, settled in for the show, and then go thirty minutes into the story without the faintest idea what is going on? Jim Jarmusch’s (Broken Flowers, Down By Law) “Limits of Control” (2009) is such an experience.
The lead character (who isn’t named, but that’s the least of your problems) is played by Isaach De Bankolé, a tall, fit black man with broad impervious features. Throughout the film, Bankolé has no more than ten lines, six of which are, “No, I do not speak Spanish,” which is the chorus in a secret pass word interchange Bankolé makes with a bizarre variety of characters, including a white-haired skinny woman made up and dressed like a character from an old movie, a buxom and bold naked woman in glasses who pops up now and then (sometimes in a cellophane raincoat sometimes without), various guitar and violin players who ramble about the essence of music, an Oriental woman whose into molecules and a Mexican (Gael García Bernal) who supplies a driver to his much awaited climactic destination.
The movie opens in the Paris airport where the mysterious lead man is given a match box and an assignment, the directions for which are rambled, which, given Bankolé ’s attitude, we assume is a contract killing of a very important person. On his flight to Madrid, xx has two espressos in two separate cups, takes a message out of the matchbox (three rows of numbers and letters), reads then swallows the message. In Madrid, Bankolé lays on top a bed without sleeping. He goes to a café and orders two espressos in two separate cups and watches a helicopter hovering overhead. While in the café, he meets a man with a violin who gives him a matchbox. Bankolé orders, reads, then swallows the message with a swig of coffee. From there he takes a train to Seville, where he lays on top of a bed without sleeping, goes to a café, orders two espressos in two separate cups. He observes the same helicopter overhead and is joined by a character who gives him a matchbox. He takes out the message, swallows it…and so xx goes through about ten such more or less identical scenarios.
Only once does Bankolé show any expression, allowing the faintest of half-smiles while watching a Flamenco dancer rehearse. There’s almost no soundtrack so that the audience is in silence almost all the time, which, for one thing, really makes a line of dialogue appreciated. In the last five minutes of the ninety minute film, Bankolé arrives at a mountaintop from which he can see the superbly guarded modern hideout of the very important man he is to kill. Then, suddenly, Bankolé is inside the fortress and face to face with the bad guy played by Bill Murray. Bankolé strangles him with a string from one of the many guitars passing through his hands on the journey.
The mystery is, “How did Bankolé go from outside the impossible fortress, to in the room with his helpless target?” When the victim asks him how he made it, Bankolé claims he simply used his imagination. Those of us in the audience, of course, think he made sense out of all those messages he swallowed. But, maybe not. What makes this mystery interesting (but certainly not interesting enough to recommend) is that, even in the long silences and repetitive scenes, no one in the audience walked out. What holds interest is the hope for a payoff. So much for hoping.
