1. I love Joy Division
2. I love the work of Anton Corbjin
You always worry whenever the lives of your heroes are portrayed on film. Will they do them justice? Will it be a fair portrayal? How much artistic license will they take and how will that affect the basic truths? The status of Joy Division is mythical and, I suspect, easy to glamorise and corrupt, but I did have a sneaking feeling that if anyone could pull it off, Anton Corbjin could. And I was right.
There are no liberties taken with the truth here. The lives of the people involved are not glamorised or exaggerated. The film is played out against the backdrop of mid-late 70s Macclesfield and Manchester, following the very ordinary lives of a set of young people who just happen to be able to make great music. They don't make much money, get involved in lots of hedonistic shananigans, take loads of drugs, they just struggle to make their music on a budget and travel between their appointments in battered old vans. And one of them is slowly falling apart emotionally, mentally and, due to his worsening epilepsy, physically.
Visually its stunning. Shot in monochrome black and white, any frame could be isolated and made into an arty poster, it captures the dreariness of the area and the time. And the lead ... debutant Sam Riley, fresh from his last job working in a shirt factory in Leeds, well, in the performance shots if you didn't know you were watching a film, you'd swear you were watching Ian Curtis.
It had received rave reviews in the press and at Cannes, but I couldn't help think, while watching it, that it was a film for fans. It's a true to life biopic, so if you know the band you know what happens, and there are no real surprises, and the life stories, as I mentioned are, on the whole ... ordinary. Aside from being a film, however, as with a lot of Anton Corbjin's work, it is, quite simply a work of art, and it is difficult to imagine how it could have been made more beautifully
