Limits of control

Isaach Bankole was French cinema's "most promising actor" Cesar award-winner in 1987 and has worked for Jim Jarmusch four times. His latest role (2009) for the American director is as the linking device for the whole of The Limits of Control. In its US closing credits, the movie is also titled No Limits No Control, and that seems an apt non sequitor for a repetitive exercise in creating variations on a theme.

One favoured descriptive word for Jarmusch's film plots is "minimalist", which can sound unfairly pejorative. As far as variationism goes, Jarmusch serves up banquets. He's an indie director with many film festival accolades and an obvious appeal to indie-minded actors. They flock to him for cameo roles containing inconsequential dialogue for offbeat characters, who are presumably great fun to portray.

Over the years, Jarmusch collected a package of such vignettes and released it, successfully at film festivals and on DVD, as Coffee and Cigarettes. Several of its episodes are well-polished cinematic gems good enough to stand on their own as finely-acted short stories, unlike the inconsequential set pieces in the latest Jarmusch .

This time there's a key central figure, the Lone Man (De Bankole), who always orders two separate espressos, but none of the lead actors smoke, even though the movie's set in Spain (Madrid, Sevilla and inland scrub). Instead, they swap boxes of "Boxer" brand matches which contain small square of white paper with coded messages which Lone Man swallows with his coffees. He does smile and emote, but very rarely. Mostly, he stares enigmatically.

So does his audience, which quickly guesses that he's a hit man receiving a series of secret instructions from international stars such as Gael Garcia Bernal (a "Mexican" with lots of skin marks), Youki Kudoh (who ponders "Molecules" on a hi-speed train) and Paz De La Huerta ("Nude", except when she's wearing a transparent plastic raincoat). Other brief walk-on roles bring previous Jarmusch movies' cast members back -- Tilda Swinton in a dazzling all-white ensemble and John Hurt in his bearded, hatted British mode.

Many of the vignettes are signposted by paintings that Lone Man has stopped to admire in an art gallery (a violin, a shroud, a cityscape) or on his solo city walks (movie poster). They all lead, eventually but without logic, to him confronting be-wigged Bill Murray (another Jarmusch fan, starring to their mutual award-winning benefit in a more mainstream collection of vignettes, Broken Flowers). The whys or wherefores of the ending do not matter; what counts presumably is the sequence.

It is devilishly attractive, in large part because of Christopher Doyle's cinematography. The HK -based associate of Wong captures and frames lovely Spanish light effects, indoors and outside, so beguilingly sometimes that a viewer could suspect him of importing tanker-loads of red paint and dye to embellish a scene. The movie is also devilishly irritating.

The variations on the theme are tiring: each character strolls in for the ceremonial coffee meeting, delivers the same opening remark in Spanish, and expounds on a fixation of no meaning to the blank-faced black actor, speaking in a mixture of English and a native language (comically in the Creole vignette). Matchboxes exchanged, the characters stroll off. Their appearances stay in the memory, though. This movie is, simply, a perverse pleasure.