Hunger
UK 2008
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham
Director: Steve McQueen
Gomorra
Italy 2008
Starring: Toni Servillo, Gianfelice Imparato Marco Macor
Director: Matteo Garrone
Of Time and the City
UK 2008
Director: Terence Davies
THE British artist Steve McQueen’s debut feature film, Hunger, does not so much unspool before your eyes as write itself on your consciousness. McQueen’s portrait of life in the Maze Prison during the early 1980s and the hunger strike and death of IRA activist, Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) transcends the polemical. It conjures a series of single words in your mind: violence, primal, degradation, impressionistic, stains, urine, and faeces.
Working from a script co-written by playwright Enda Walsh, McQueen has an artist’s predilection for imagery and a storyteller’s gift for creating suspense. He has clearly absorbed and transcended the influence of Nicolas Roeg, who messed around with narrative flow in his time, and has seen Alan Clarke’s dialogue-free portrait of violence begetting violence in Northern Ireland, Elephant.
Hunger begins with a prison guard having breakfast alone – a scene charged with emotion.. Here is a man who does not make light of his profession, who cannot have much to look forward to in his day. We are appalled as he sweeps the crumbs from his napkin onto the carpet, a casual disregard for a mess that he really is not cleaning up (a metaphor if ever you saw one). Later McQueen’s camera contemplates his knuckles. Why are they raw and bloody? Why do none of his fellow officers speak to him?
There is an irrefutable logic about making unspeakable violence truly unspeakable. Yet there is conventional suspense as the officer checks his car for explosive devices, his wife nervously looking out of the window. In these short scenes, McQueen conjures a whole world, without music and without false emotion. An empty street, we note, means everyone is hiding.
McQueen does not introduce Sands until halfway through the film. Instead, we follow two new inmates as they are inducted into the Maze, stripped of their clothes. We see the beatings inflicted by the guards, which are deemed necessary to subdue the prisoners. We see the prisoners smuggle their notes out through saliva or contact with their kin. We see shit used as a protest tool: a series of brown concentric circles hosed off thanklessly by the prison staff. McQueen could have easily made a film that sided with the prisoners in their struggle to have their political status recognised, symbolised by being allowed to wear their own clothes. He doesn’t delve deeply into the politics, or even evaluate the strategy of hunger strikes – protests designed to shame the British and create martyrs for the Republican cause. His portrait – it is not drama in the conventional sense – is more even-handed. He respects the British losses as well.
In the middle of the film is a long dialogue between Sands and his priest (Liam Cunningham). It is cut-the-bull quick-fire banter between two men who respect but fundamentally disagree with one another. The priest does not represent the British, but the sanctity of life. By contrast, Sands offers his own form of Republicanism. He does not care what the leadership thinks. He trusts his own instincts. The scene contains its own death: Sands condemning himself. It is far more effective than Sands’ own death scene, which comes later. McQueen’s attempt to use the camera expressively is the film’s only false moment.
With such emotionally charged subject matter and wounds still raw, some may wonder what the point of the film is. McQueen takes the hunger strikes out of a historical narrative of winners and losers and illustrates the reduced level of human experience that really characterised the Troubles. This is a film that makes us never forget that violence is always born out of fear and a loss of control. It does not invite vicarious enjoyment. Yet you also realise how far British society has moved on since the early 1980s. The fear that we are told justifies 42 days’ detention without charge does not exist in the way it did in Northern Ireland, in another “war on terror”, two decades ago. McQueen makes the British stance in the 1980s somewhat understandable in an atmosphere of daily terror in comparison with now. Hunger makes a timely point that incarceration breeds violence and that which is suppressed ultimately explodes.
Patrick Mulcahy
WATCHING Gomorra, the wildly-acclaimed new film about Naples’ Mafia-dominated crime-culture known as the “Camorra”, one is reminded of Raymond Chandler’s comment that, when he was stuck for a plot development, he simply had a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. This occurs quite often in Matteo Garrone’s film, the difference being that the room into which the gun-toting person enters will often already include several armed individuals – and pretty much everyone we see in this picture has an unusually frisky trigger-finger.
The Naples suburbs we see are very much a world gone wrong. But while the Camorra is explicitly a Neapolitan nightmare – what is wrong extends far beyond the city limits. Garrone is explicitly indicting the whole of Italy for the social malaise which he so minutely and clinically explores here.
His technique might be termed “cold-boiled”, as there’s always a certain chilly detachment evident as we move between half a dozen interlinked stories – the non-fiction book on which it’s based (and which has led to author Roberto Saviano receiving a kind of Camorra fatwa for his pains) presumably covers even more plots and subplots. The most vivid and manageable of the film’s strands involves a pair of young hotheads keen to scale the criminal ladder. It’s a shame that the episodic narrative doesn’t allow sufficient screen-time for the rather terrific, instinctive performance from newcomer Marco Macor as a Scarface-wannabe.
While Garrone’s approach is admirable clear-eyed, intelligent and measured, there’s also something forbidding and off-putting about the results. It’s hard to find a way into these narratives, and after a while a certain monotonousness sets in – and it’s more than simply a case of gun-toting individuals suddenly entering the scene to cause yet more bloody mayhem.
It should be possible to evoke such the appropriate atmospheres and moods without making proceedings such an ordeal, but Gomorra becomes somewhat oppressive in its relentlessness, more of an exercise in tamped-down verisimilitude than a convincing dispatch from the blood-spattered frontline. We duly endure life’s rancid pageant – births, marriages, deaths and everything in between – but to what end? What have we really learned by the time the bitter, downbeat conclusion has arrived? All we’re left with is the poison-bitter taste of corruption in our mouths, pervasive and inescapable.
Terence Davies’ feature-film debut, 1988’s Distant Voices, Still Lives, plus his follow-up, The Long Day Closes, are the key works in a career which has led to him being regarded in many quarters – if not in his native land – as one of our few genuine world-class auteurs. He has, however, been away from the limelight since 2000’s Edith Wharton adaptation The House of Mirth. He’s had a long and public struggle to obtain with funding – partly because the poetical, intimately personal projects he wants to make are seldom anyone’s idea of commercial hot properties, and partly because of his “outspoken” contributions to the cultural debate. He now makes a somewhat unlikely – but enormously welcome – return to prominence with Of Time and the City, a documentary which was one of the critical sensations at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Ferocious in its erudite intelligence, blazing in its indignation and often wickedly funny, the film is narrated by Davies himself in what’s one of the most astonishing performances in recent cinema.
Made for a shoestring £250,000, it was developed – along with two other digital features –- to mark Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture, and is a wonderfully erudite and blazingly personal love-letter (albeit one that’s often bracingly sour in tone) to his home city. A kaleidoscope of footage – some shot especially for the film, much of it judiciously extracted from the archives – is accompanied by Davies’ own booming tones recounting his mercurial relationship with the place he grew up in, while also recording its historical, social, economic and cultural changes.
The tone is elegiac, confessional, sometimes blisteringly sardonic, with results that combine the poignant with the laugh-out-loud amusing: Davies thus proves an unexpected and rather high-falutin’ addition to the legendary ranks of Liverpool funny men. His intentions, though, are fundamentally serious: he has numerous political axes to grind and does so with meticulous determination in an eloquent, rousing polemic that covers a startling amount of ground in barely 70-odd minutes. Strongly recommended.
Neil Young
