STEADY DIET OF NOTHING : 'Gomorra' [6/10] online THU 16 OCT; 'Hunger' [7/10] online FRI.17.OCT.

GOMORRA   [6/10]
Gomorrah : Italy 2008 : Matteo GARRONE : 137m (BBFC) : seen 13 Oct, Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle (£6.85)
   Watching Gomorra - the wildly-acclaimed new film about Naples' Mafia-dominated crime-culture, known as the 'Camorra' - one is reminded of Raymond Chandler's much-quoted 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.
   It turns out, however, that Chandler has been somewhat misquoted all these years. The line comes from the introduction to The Simple Art of Murder, during a discussion of the "hard-boiled" school of pulp novelists - a grouping which Chandler analyses from the outside. The quote, taken in its entirety, does nevertheless fit Gomorra pretty well:

Most of the plots were rather ordinary and most of the characters rather primitive types of people ... [who] lived in a world gone wrong... The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night... The ... demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. This could get to be pretty silly, but somehow it didn't seem to matter.
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   The Naples suburbs we see are very much "a world gone wrong", and the wrongest locus of all is a spectacular Martian-pyramidic block of flats which Christoph Huber, one of the film's many passionate and persuasive admirers, wonderfully described as a "ziggurat of fear." Among many its indictments, Gomorra is partly a savage attack on dysfunctional, anti-human 1960s/70s architecture.) But while the Camorra is explicitly a Neapolitan nightmare (see Francesco Rosi's Hands Over the City for a glimpse of how such issues affected lives here four decades ago) the wrongness clearly 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 twentyish hotheads keen to scale the criminal ladder - just a shame that the episodic narrative doesn't allow sufficient screen-time for the rather terrific, instinctive performance from newcomer Marco Macor as Scarface-wannabe 'Marco' (the fact that character and actor share the same name, and that 'Marco Macor' sounds rather like an anagrammatical nom d'ecran, intriguingly hint that the thespian is likely an inhabitant of the actual incendiary milieu here depicted.)
   While Garrone's approach is admirable clear-eyed, intelligent and measured - no score, no cheap foleyed sound-effects (how refreshing to see cigarettes being lit without the dubbed-in sizzle so inescapable in current world cinema) 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.
   Of course, Garrone would defend himself by saying that life under the Camorra - a much more amorphous, chaotic, unstructured (perhaps even post-modern?) form of Crime Inc than that to be found elsewhere in Italy - is monotonous, tedious, stifling, a world away from most 'Mafia' movies or even the colourful pyrotechnics of, say, City of God.
   But it should be possible to evoke such the appropriate atmospheres and moods without making proceedings such an ordeal - and, at nearly 2 1/2 hours, Gomorra does become somewhat oppressive in its relentlessness, more of an exercise in tamped-down verisimilitude than a convincing dispatch from the blood-spattered front-lines.
   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 - and a roadside pile of mouldy peaches, ditched at dawn.
    16.10.08

HUNGER   [7/10]
UK (UK/Ire) 2008 : Steve McQUEEN : 96m (BBFC) : seen 14 Oct, Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle (press show)

Five weeks out to sea we were now forty-three
Our comrades we buried each morning.
In our own slime we were lost in a time.
Endless night without dawning.
                    Bobby Sands, Back Home in Derry

Almost exactly a year after Anton Corbijn's Control arrived on our screens, here comes Steve McQueen's Hunger. The parallels between the two films are striking. Both are unconventional, partial "biopics" of young men from the British Isles who died as a result of their own actions in the early 1980s: Joy Division singer Ian Curtis (principal focus of Control) hanged himself, aged 23, in May 1980. IRA activist Bobby Sands (principal focus of Hunger) starved himself to death as a protest at prison conditions in May 1981.
   Control premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2007, winning the top prize in the Directors' Fortnight section and Special Mention in the Camera d'Or competition restricted to debutant directors. Hunger premiered at Cannes in May 2008, winning the top prize in the ‘Un Certain Regard' section, and also the Camera d'Or. Control was a belated first feature from Corbijn, who had achieved considerable renown in other fields of the visual arts (photography and music-video); Hunger is the (somewhat) belated first feature from Steve McQueen, who has achieved considerable renown in other fields of the visual arts (he beat Tracey Emin to the Turner Prize with one of his video-installation pieces).
   Both films have resonant, intriguing one-word-noun titles. Both films feature their protagonist on the poster, smoking a cigarette. Both films herald the arrival of exciting new British-based film-making talents. But whereas Control was something of a masterpiece, one which left this viewer emotionally shaken and rather stunned, Hunger is "only" a significantly above-average work, one which impresses from a technical and artistic viewpoint more than it engages on an emotional level. It's an easy film to admire and appreciate in intellectual terms, especially as a paean to persistence, resourcefulness and resistance - but it's also so unremittingly grim, so tightly-controlled in every aspect, that watching it becomes something of an ordeal.
   Of course, any film about this particular subject - the brutalities in the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland in the 1980s - must by its very nature be tough going. The trouble is, McQueen uses this still-explosive material as a launching-point for an aesthetic exercise which comes to have less and less directly to do with Sands or the other characters. Just as Sands (Michael Fassbender) physically wastes away to nothing before our eyes in gruesome fashion, the character also becomes less and less distinct as he essentially becomes a vehicle for McQueen's minute investigation of the world. We're constantly aware of McQueen's presence, just as we're constantly aware of Fassbender's suffering for his art - shades of Christian Bale in The Machinist.
   Fassbender, who even at the start is much more sinewy and whippetlike than the actual, rather chunky Sands, executes a "feat" as much as a performance. Likewise, the picture's pivotal scene, a ten-minute two-hander between Sands and a sympathetic, questioning priest (Liam Cunningham), which is shot in a single ten-minute take - just for the sake of doing so. It's what schoolkids call "showing off", and this is, perhaps intentionally, just what the priest accuses Sands of - a variation on the Murder in the Cathedral taunt that "the last temptation is the greatest treason, to do the right thing from the wrong reason."
   Taken on a scene-by-scene basis, Hunger is a remarkable achievement. But it doesn't quite add up into a film. By the end, you do wonder whether McQueen is even much interested in Bobby Sands at all - this could be anyone in any kind of extremis situation, and many of the prison-brutality scenes are all too familiar from Hollywood's "trouble in the Big House" genre and its arthouse variants.
   We never find out why Sands was inside, never hear the specifics of the "five demands" which Sands and his colleagues requested in their bid to be treated as political prisoners (a special status denied them in life by Mrs Thatcher, present here as a chillingly sonorous disembodied voice, but implicitly and posthumously granted them by McQueen.)
   Everyone exists in spaces which the camera can minutely inspect. Everyone moves within buildings which the camera can strikingly frame. Was Sands' story chosen by McQueen - who co-wrote the screenplay with playright Enda Walsh (and that pivotal dialogue is much more theatrical than cinematic) - primarily because of its ongoing controversy-value, because to address such a topic will automatically result in a Work Of Art? Would we be making anything like so much fuss about this film if it had been a piercingly intimate examination not of Bobby Sands but, say, of Bobby George as he prepared to take on Eric Bristow at Jollees Cabaret Club in Stoke-on.Trent in February 1980, for the World Darts Championship?
   A facetious question? Very probably. But, for all Hunger's undeniable merits and achievements, I can't help but be reminded of David Thomson's reaction to Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice: "the mise-en-scene is relentless. The perfection has something monstrous about it... For this viewer, there is something tyrannical about it that spurs irreverent thoughts of resistance."
   17.10.08

Neil YoungNeil Young

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