| this week's Tribune review : 'Joy Division' [8/10] |
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| Monday, 28 April 2008 | |
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Joy Division UK 2007 Documentary with : Tony Wilson, Bernard Sumner Director : Grant Gee ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ FANS of The Fall, The Smiths, Buzzcocks, Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses, James and Inspiral Carpets will just have to hang on for a while: the only post-punk Manchester band allowed to be the subject of films right now is, it seems, Joy Division. Last October brought us Anton Corbijn's Control, tracing the troubled, short life of the band's ill-fated frontman Ian Curtis - and now we have a non-fiction feature which covers broadly similar ground, the baldly-named Joy Division. Devotees of the band must reckon Christmas has come twice in less than a year - and while Grant Gee's movie falls (perhaps inevitably) short of Corbijn's shattering minor-masterpiece, it's still an emphatically superior example of the music-documentary form. Joy Division will likely to prove informative, absorbing and worthwhile even for those indifferent to the cultishly downbeat band which, following Curtis's suicide, became global bestsellers New Order. "Indifference" is on very short supply, however, in the film itself - and it's testament to the skill of Gee and his key collaborator, editor Jerry Chater (who consistently works rough-edged wonders with a dizzying variety of extant footage) - that the overall tone is one of heartfelt tribute rather than hagiography. A major help in this regard is the way Joy Division (like Control) finds flinty humour in what's essentially grim material, and carefully avoids being just another telling of the 'Ian Curtis Story' - indeed, Gee is at pains to examine the band as a whole, within their geographical and industrial context. Among a slew of expert witnesses and interested parties, the most entertaining - and, given his own recent demise, inescapably poignant - testimony is provided by Tony Wilson, whose Factory label released both of Joy Division's ever-influential studio-albums (1979's Unknown Pleasures and 1980's Closer.) But the surviving band-members - Bernard Sumner (reflective), Peter Hook (laddish) and Stephen Morris (eerily ageless) - are also in garrulous form in talking-head interviews, providing invaluable first-hand recollections of this seminal group's all-too-brief existence. Neil Young  JOY DIVISION : [8/10] : Grant GEE : UK (UK/US) 2008 : 93m (BBFC) seen (1) at Pictureville cinema, National Media Museum, Bradford : 14th February 2008 : public show (complimentary ticket) : Bradford International Film Festival (2) at Cornerhouse cinema, Manchester : 9th April 2008 : press/preview screening original mini-review from Bradford, plus longer reviews of other films from the festival, can be found here |
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