If you know Jim Jarmusch’s work, you have probably already seen The Limits of Control (2009). If so, you no doubt appreciated the film as a gorgeous-looking and satisfyingly meditative response to Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999). The two movies involve assassins of African complexion, but their characters couldn’t be more different. Superficially, Forest Whitaker’s “Ghost Dog” is a far more talkative and philosophical hit man than Isaach De Bankolé’s “Lone Man”. The true distinction between them is in their mobility: Ghost Dog is a monk-like person with a fixed yet secret address who binds his actions with a code of behavior. Lone Man is boundless, borderless and homeless. He travels so light that he’s not even there. He truly moves like a ghost, not a man imitating one.

Lone Man is almost a cypher, quietly making connections with quirky characters bearing matchboxes in a daisy chain across Spain. As long as he answers the pass-phrase correctly, the eccentrics coach him closer and closer to his target by swapping a blue for a red box of wood matches (or vice-versa). He silently accepts the encrypted message within (then consumes it with a gulp of espresso), and also takes with him a philosophical nugget to be decrypted later in the film.

People unaware of Jarmusch, will likely find this movie unnecessarily ponderous and the payoff less than satisfying. The encounters that the assassin has with his matchbox-swappers are lean, like a plate of food at a stereotypical expensive restaurant, the food is exquisitely crafted, but there ain’t much of it.

What there is a lot of is Spain. Starting and ending in Madrid and in between winding across the countryside to Sevilla and Almería, The Limits of Control pays homage to the easy pace of life on the Iberian Peninsula by adopting that pace. The deliberate tempo is a potential source of great frustration for an audience from somewhere like the USA. I know because I spent a college semester studying in Sevilla, and the movie brought me right back to the crazy medieval streets of the neighborhoods I lived in, ate in and got really, really drunk in.

During my stay I heard the gripes of many a fellow American. “Nothing gets done here!” “Things are so slow!” The subtext was, “No one is competent here because they are not in a hurry.” Spain moves as fast as it needs to, and if you don’t like it you don’t belong there. Jarmusch’s assassin is a sort of chameleon–although his ebony skin color would never go unnoticed in a non-fictional Spain–and he finds a way to belong and to get things done. Unlike the Jason Bourne-type of assassin, De Bankolé’s character never runs, carries a gun, drives, kisses a girl, nor does he get angry. Ever. He’s the antithesis of a Hollywood character, and for this reason he just may be closer to the truth.