Manchester is a grey city. One of the merits of Corbijn’s film is that it displays these greys of factories, smoke, office workers’ settlements, pubs and concert halls. He creates a perfect Manchester setting, so now we can truly have an idea why the legendary new wave stars began to play music there. The depths of A38, also offering some industrial environment, provided a perfect match to it all. New music genres are said to have been born here. Many, a whole crowd stare at the screen in prefect darkness, and no one would make a sound.

The story of the film that was premiéred at the 2007 Cannes festival is not about Joy Division. It is more a feature than a standard of music history. Film time ranges from the early seventies, Ian’s school years to 1980, when he committed suicide. It focuses on the miserable love triangle, and the plot is based on what Corbijn made out of the biography that Ian’s widow had written. I know that each rock and roll widow writes at least one book about her husband. Ian gets together with his friend’s girlfriend Debbie, marries her at an early age, works at a job centre, they have a child, and so he lives a bourgeois life in Manchester. In the meantime, his music career is launched as well. During their concert series, he meets Annik Honoré, an amateur journalist from France, quite a pattern in the world of rock music. His wife is at home with the baby, washing, changing diapers, and making dinner, but that alienates her from the artist as he is only into poetry and music. Only women could write nice poems about full diapers, so he opts for a girl who is without any deformity (see child), and can thus attend concerts and hold his head when he is throwing up, for instance. This story is quite average up t this point, but Curtis is so sensitive and inclined to epilepsy that he breaks under the burden of choice between bourgeois and beat, the two women, and thus becomes a victim of it all, a last supper, and he dies. It is painful to see that he hangs himself on the very pulley where his wife had hung the clothes on. Folks, that is poetry, to finish something like that.
The film offers no archive footages, and the actors play the music parts themsleves, quite authentically, let me highlight the protagonist here. Some key events of music history were used, like the Sex Pistol gig in Manchester – the characters are standing in front of he club – when Curtis decides to form the band. We can even see some fine moments about the working methods of managers discovering new talents.

After the film, old friends from the Budapets concert halls in the eighties and nineties start a discussion about the “golden age”, and it is good to hear music journalist Zsolt Déry talk to Corbijn. The director tells us that the widow has not spoken to him since the premiére. It must be hard to process when you see your own weird fate on the screen.
Well, life works in mysterious ways, but we, privileged ones, can find out what this was – a life or an oeuvre. Doubtless to say, the film is not a band story but a biographical piece with soundtrack. A proper one. 

And we would go on as though nothing was wrong.
And hide from these days we remained all alone.