An anonymous hit man (Isaach De Bankol) goes to Spain on assignment in Jim Jarmusch's film The Limits of Control. (Alliance Films)

Just as there are limits to control, so, too, there are limits to love. At least that's how I've felt while puzzling over (and over and over) Jim Jarmusch's latest film, The Limits of Control.

Jarmusch, the silver-haired fox behind the stunning Dead Man (1995) and that glorious ode to scruffy misfits Down by Law (1986), has been crafting gorgeous, left-of-centre films for more than two decades now. With their cool, minimalist visuals, languorous rhythm and outsider protagonists, his movies have prompted me, on more than one occasion, to make embarrassingly gushy declarations about the auteur.

For the first three quarters of The Limits of Control, I felt like I was basking in some gorgeous cinephile's dream.

The Limits of Control, however, puts me in the terrible position of having to admit that even though this movie looks like Jarmusch, sounds like Jarmusch and, hell, even features some of the actors (Bill Murray and Isaach de Bankolé) from the director's best work, something in this movie gets lost in translation.

It doesn't start out that way. After a visually striking opening, all shimmering lights in a highway tunnel, we spot the film's central character, an assassin known only as the Lone Man (Isaach de Bankolé), while he's practising tai chi moves in an airport washroom stall. He meets his contacts, two guys in shades, in the airport lounge, where they give him cryptic directions about his upcoming mission. As in vintage Jarmusch, communication is both complicated and comic: one of the men speaks only Creole, the other translates (very loosely) into English, but somehow, the trio muddles through, until The Creole says, "It's cool. He gets it."

The Lone Man sets out on his journey, taking a plane to Madrid, a train to Seville, then a car to remotest Spain to complete his mysterious task. Perhaps it's wrong to call it a journey, since his motion feels more circular than linear, and the repetition that follows borders on the obsessive-compulsive. At each destination, our anti-hero arrives at a café, orders two espressos in two separate cups, meets with a contact and exchanges multi-coloured "le Boxeur" matchbooks. These encounters are virtually identical, beginning when the contact says, "You don't speak Spanish, right?" and ending when The Lone Man reads, then promptly eats, the paper instructions.

The Blonde (Tilda Swinton) is a mysterious film enthusiast in The Limits of Control. (Alliance Films)

Small variations crop up in the small talk his liaisons choose to make. One reverently describes the sound of notes resonating in a musical instrument's wood; another speaks of molecules; another ponders the origins of the word "bohemian"; and another, played by Gael Garcia Barnal, stops by to talk about peyote. In the best of these exchanges, Tilda Swinton appears in an ash blond fright wig and cowboy hat to deliver a note-perfect riff on movies, offering up her thoughts on everything from Hitchcock's Suspicion to Rita Hayworth's days as a blond. It's ridiculously self-reflexive, but also slyly funny, as when she muses, "Sometimes, I like it in films where people just sit there, not saying anything." This statement is applicable to most of Jarmusch's work, but particularly this film, where the enigmatic hero is so silent, I almost wanted a medic to come check his pulse.

Swinton's character (known only as The Blonde) provides one way to read The Limits of Control, which, in its most dazzling moments (and there are many), is a movie about the love of movies. Cineastes will see a nod to John Boorman's Point Blank (1967) in the opening credits, and the references keep coming. In addition to replicating the infamous hall of mirrors shot from Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai (1947), The Limits of Control offers up an exquisitely edited bit involving a nude girl (Paz de la Huerta) and a gun that is straight out of Godard, and shots of the Spanish architecture that rival anything Antonioni shot in his modernist 1960's heyday.

The Limits of Control is visually breathtaking from start to finish. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle (who has demonstrated that he can make anything, even a thermos full of noodles look positively sexy) isn't shooting a glossy travelogue here. Doyle finds something off-kilter, even punk, in the back alleyways of Seville, an elevator's candy-apple-coloured walls or the winding staircases of an aging Madrid apartment building. Doyle's work is so strong, that for the first three quarters of The Limits of Control, I felt like I was basking in some gorgeous, cinephile's dream. But this hazy, not-quite-real vibe is also the film's undoing, because at some point, the Lone Man's meetings start to feel like they should amount to something, anything.

While I don’t need a plot to entertain me, I came away from The Limits of Control feeling let down, maybe even duped. The film invites several interpretations: it’s partly about art vs. commerce, but a bumper sticker in the film that reads La vida no vale nade (“life is worthless”) and a line about reality being “arbitrary” suggest it’s all existential.

In the end, for all of its talk, The Limits of Control seems to settle on no meaning at all. The Swinton character is right when she observes that “the best films are like a dream you’re never sure you really had.” However, in this instance, her pronouncement holds less true. This movie may be as cool and pretty as one of Doyle’s smoke rings, but it also evaporates just as quickly. I guess even Jarmusch has his limits.

The Limits of Control opens in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver on May 22.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.