Review of The Limits of Control (2009) by William W — 02 Aug 2009

I seem to disagree with most people about this film. I thought it was one of the films of the year.

The 'lack of plot' that people seem to complain about needs to be understood within the genre of the film, which, to my mind, is allegory. Once you get that it's an allegory, not a realist story, the movie begins to resinate on so many levels, and you let go of your need for action, character development, etc. The allegory takes over.

It has all the classic conventions of an allegory: a threshold scene, personfication, allegorical dialogue, a cyclic structure, an enchanted setting, a quest, and numerous pretexts which are named in the movie including Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train.

I want to suggest that one possible reading of the film is that it is an allegory of art struggling against the forces of capitalist globalisation. It takes Woody Guthrie's message (on his guitar): "this machine kills fascists" as its central pretext. It's message is that art will prevail and that imagination is the most powerful human attribute.

It resonates on so many levels, with so many possibilities, I came out of the film with my head full of ideas and thoughts. A sign for me of a great film.