"Sometimes the reflection is far more present than the thing being reflected," says one of the Lone Man's contacts in Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control, and in fact one of the pleasures of this film is seeing Spain through the eyes of legendary cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who is taken, magpie-like, by every glass wall and glittering window in Madrid.
Another is contemplating the inscrutable Lone Man (played by Isaach De Bankolé), whose carefully controlled expression is a study in contrasts: handsome and ugly, modern and ancient, violent and pacific. His face is downright fascinating, in fact, the particular lines of it are like a conversation that never ends—sometimes willfully flat, other times all fullness and curving contours, but most often at some unfathomable point in between.
The third, but not the least pleasure of Limits is watching all of the above while giant buckets of golden sound are poured lavishly on top of you like aromatic water at a Japanese bathhouse. This is the drone rock of bands like Boris, Sunn O))), and Earth, and the feedback afterglow of it is a kind of audio analogue to Christopher Doyles' reflections: more present than the notes that generated it. After all, this is a Jarmusch film, so its relationship to music is anything but casual. Violins and guitars appear as symbolic props throughout, like they were plucked out of a Juan Gris painting. One of the most memorable moments is when the Lone Man happens upon a rehearsal in a small nightclub where he watches some ardent Flamenco. One character says he believes that musical instruments retain every note that has ever been played on them and that these notes resonate within them forever like a kind of sonic karma. For an assassin like the Lone Man, the implications of such a statement are clear.
I once heard a Mark Rothko painting. I turned a corner at the San Francisco MoMA, and I heard a single, unified sound radiating from Rothko's No. 14 like a hundred monks humming the same note. One of the final scenes in The Limits of Control is like this. The Lone Man sits in front of a white-on-white Arte Povera piece; the luminous din of drone rock is all around him. The nothingness of the painting, the rising tide of sound...it all comes together in a moment of abstract resonance that vibrates clean off the screen. The end of the film, in fact, is full of such emptiness—blank walls, blank canvases, blank slips of paper. Does the Lone Man experience this abstraction as a relief from what he has done, or a consequence of it? Is this the freedom of the afterlife or the simple oblivion of death? With nothing left to control, the world seems drained of content or maybe it's just a break between acts, like the gap between songs on an album. "The best films are like dreams you're never really sure you had," says one of the Lone Man's contacts in an earlier exchange, and it's clear that Jarmusch isn't about to decipher this one for you. You have to use your imagination.
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