KEY POINTS:
Herald rating: * *
Not to be confused with Control, the biopic of Ian Curtis, front man for the post-punk Manchester band that rejoiced in the same name, this cheerless drama showcases a level of technical bravura on the part of director Traviss, who is making his feature
debut. But while it is harrowingly explicit and shocking, it exerts no emotional pull because it never gets us to engage with its characters.
It fancies itself as a meditation on "memory, identity, love and trust" but it's a run-of-the-mill war story and the director's insistence on editing it into a non-chronological jigsaw puzzle are more pretentious than effective.
Stoppard (son of Tom) plays Thomas, a man sent to London in 1962 to spy for the Soviets; the back story shows him seized by a young love that will be ripped apart by the Russian troops who swept through Silesia and killed his family.
The wartime set pieces transcend their budgetary limitations but for most of its running time the film is wilfully obscure. The repetition of fragmentary scenes is plainly intended to show that he is haunted by his past but they are affected and puzzling.
The movie also suffers from the classic war-film language problem: shall we have unsubtitled Russian, subtitled Russian or English dialogue with creepy central-casting accents? Let's have all three - even in the same scene. And the repeated expository voiceover, with such lines as "one emotion tumbled into another, like an unstoppable force" is pretty much the last straw. Even the likeable Bernard Hill, as the Russkis' main man in London, can't rescue matters.
There is no evidence that Traviss knows the origin of his title - the original Joy Divisions were Jewish women kept as sex slaves by Nazi concentration camp guards - but his closing scene makes a mockery of any irony it might have imparted. A life of suicide rocker Ian Curtis may be a better bet.
Cast: Ed Stoppard, Bernadette Heerwagen, Bernard Hill, Michelle Gayle, Lea Mornar
Director: Reg Traviss
Running time: 105 mins
Rating:Screening: Rialto
Verdict: Historical drama set in World War II and the Cold War is ponderous and needlessly complicated but technically accomplished
