New Joy Division Doc Delivers… The Girlfriend!

4:13 PM GMT 29/01/2008

LEAVING LAST NIGHT’s press screening of Grant Gee’s much-anticipated Joy Division documentary – simply entitled Joy Division, form-and-function fans – it must be admitted that our eyes were a little damp.

Although coming just three months after Anton Corbijn’s Control, screening in front of a grumpy young media crowd (your writer excepted) who felt they already knew the tragic story of Ian Curtis and were in no hurry to hear it again, Joy Division cut through assumptions and re-presented what many thought was an oft-told tale with intelligence, insight, humour and warmth. Key to this was the variety of voices present and, perhaps understandably, an intelligent approach to the visual design within the picture frame, from the use of fonts to the lighting of interview subjects, the near-Victorian footage of ’70s Manchester and the itemised jottings in late manager Rob Gretton’s notebooks (Who’d have thought the scribbled words “May 15. Change pounds into dollars” would have an emotional charge? But they do.)

In addition to moving interviews with Joy Division/New Order band members Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris were thoughts and theories from members of the band’s wider circle (Peter Saville, Malcolm Whitehead, Genesis P. Orridge) and, most significantly, Ian Curtis’ girlfriend at the time of his suicide, Annick Honoré. There were audible gasps in the audience when Honoré – the “other woman” – appeared on the screen and her assured presence and undeniable beauty brought a welcome new perspective on Ian’s final year and his desires for escape. “She was sophistication,” explains a still awed Stephen Morris, “especially to someone who used to ride pigs for entertainment.”

The story revealed in MOJO 159, that JD guitarist Bernard Sumner managed to hypnotise Curtis in an effort to ease his psychological turmoil, is backed up with an actual tape recording of the session, with an apparently regressing Curtis re-living a former life “sitting up at night, reading books of laws”. Elsewhere, bassist Peter Hook reveals that he took the call that brought the news of Curtis’s suicide, then sat down and finished his Sunday lunch before telling his then-wife what had happened.

We’ve been inundated with high-quality music documentaries in the last eight years, films that – in the wake of Julien Temple’s gold-standard Sex Pistols doc The Filth and The Fury – have matched high-quality film research with moving and in-depth artist interviews and the necessary level of historical context. However, even when placed alongside The Future Is Unwritten, End of The Century and The Filth And The Fury itself, Gee’s documentary remains exceptional. If Control was the romance, this is the reality.

See the trailer here...

Andrew Male

Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 4:13 PM GMT 29/01/2008