In the opening minutes of co-writer-director-actor Benjamin Dickinson’s Creative Control, a character states that philosophy is “on-trend.” Viewer, take note. The film deals with alienation, masculinity and the nature of images and reality in a fast-paced, wondrously-photographed (in black and white) story of broken people in a fallen world.
Set in a near-future Brooklyn, the film follows the relationships between two sets of young working professionals. David (Dickinson) is a rising star in a sleek ad agency, and lives with his yoga-instructor girlfriend Juliette (Nora Zehetner). His best friend Wim (Dan Gill) is a philandering fashion photographer in a long-term-relationship with Sophie (Alexia Rasmussen), a visual artist.
The plot hinges on David’s new campaign for Augmenta, an “augmented-reality” product. We observe these couples through a linear but unruly narrative with David and Juliette each achieving professional successes and failures as their relationship crumbles. David hires Sophie to work for his agency and quickly becomes infatuated with her, thanks in part to the Augmenta glasses he’s testing out. Meanwhile, Wim tries to make David envious of an affair he has with a model, and Juliette, feeling David becoming ever more distant, begins a relationship with a fellow yoga instructor.
Dickinson’s ambitious film evokes cinematic history as it expresses complex themes. His opening shot mirrors that of Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte, with an elevator, a tracking camera and a skyline replete with new construction. Like Antonioni’s film, Creative Control is a relationship drama full of hollow bacchanalia, nostalgia and questions of authenticity. However, David, unlike Antonioni’s protagonist, is no sexual dynamo. The naked women he sees are images or holograms, not flesh-and-blood humans desperate for affection. Also unlike La notte, David does not yet have creative control over his work; he is still struggling to make a mark. His male identity is in crisis, and nowhere is his failing masculinity more apparent than when his boss hands him the Augmenta glasses with the admonition to “get intimate with a pair.”
Here is where Dickinson turns to Fight Club, another text about emasculation. Fincher’s unnamed narrator re-claims his masculinity through a fantasy in which his avatar is the ultimate alpha male. David does something similar as his Augmenta glasses allow him to dominate a fictional proto-reality. Creative Control visually signals its debt to Fight Club with several extreme close-ups of inanimate objects, slow-motion sequences and one foreshadowing shot of David’s apartment echoing the narrator’s burning condo.
Creative Control is praiseworthy simply for its sheer audacity, but it does not pull off its ambitions, highlighting the impotence and anomie of modern society without adding substance to the conversation. Instead, it is yet one more character study of a not-so-great Great Man. The film has other issues. Its dialogue is excellently conceived at key moments but is otherwise puerile. David and his colleagues are bland; how did such idea-less people come to populate a successful advertising firm? The contrast between David and Juliette, the ad man and the yogi, is contrived and obvious, perhaps even more because viewers have already seen New York ad men self-destruct on “Mad Men.”
That said, there are many reasons to see this film, from Adam Newport-Berra’s sensational cinematography to a grandly selected score full of Handel, Bach and others. But best of all may be the film’s mic-drop ending.