Joy Division

There’s no doubting the ambitious scope of Reg Traviss’ directorial debut, Joy Division. The opening minutes ricochet between a sun-scorched Mexico in 1966, a bomb-ravaged Germany towards the end of World War II, and a swinging London of Carnaby Street fashions and red phone boxes, though never - it should be clarified - to the post-punk Manchester of Ian Curtis. The latter’s band took its name from the 1955 novel House of Dolls by Holocaust survivor Ka-Tzetnik 135633, in which ‘joy divisions’ were groups of women kept as sex slaves in Nazi labour camps, a subject at which Traviss’ epic only tenuously hints.

The story follows young German Thomas (with Tom Schilling playing him as a boy and Ed Stoppard as an adult) through conscription, first love and the death of his parents to post-war KGB enrolment and a subsequent double-life in England. Finding a room in a London boarding house, he spends his time painting at his easel or in the bath with the landlord’s niece (Michelle Gayle), then ducking out for incognito rendezvous on park benches with equivocating KGB agent Dennis (Bernard Hill), his undercover contact.

Traviss has really made two films, a WWII love story and a London spy movie (the bookend sequences in the sweating haze of Central America hint at a third). But, despite his confident jumbling of places and times, Traviss fails to conceal either the thinness of his material or its thematic banality. The spy story, in which Thomas feels the pinch as his KGB superiors come to suspect his contact’s loyalty to the cause, is fatally underwritten, hiding the vague plot behind turned up coat collars and a convoluted algebra of code-speak that, post-Austin Powers, feels absurdly straight-faced. Even so, these scenes have a boyish appeal, the pleasingly minimal art direction conjuring tangible mystery from Bakelite telephones and revolving tape spools.

At times this abstracted milieu recalls TV classics such as The Avengers, and so cries out for a charismatic spy hero of the calibre of John Steed. Instead, Stoppard’s Thomas is pallidly earnest, a scrambled cipher of a protagonist. Schilling is no less winsome, and Joy Division is at its lowest ebb in amber scenes of puppy love with pigtailed Melanie (Bernadette Heerwagen) back in Germany. The coyness of these moments makes for an uneasy contrast with later, lingering shots of her repeated rape by Russian soldiers (the closest the film gets to the sexual horrors of the actual joy divisions). Again, Traviss’ film is partially salvaged by its production design, and by the director’s remarkably sure handling of the larger canvas. The wartime scenes amid the rubble of a devastated Germany are atmospherically achieved with a terrible authenticity that sits incongruously with the blank-slate characters.


This review features in the December 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.