Hunger
UK 2008
Starring : Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham
Director : Steve McQueen
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Of Time and the City
UK 2008
Documentary narrated and directed by : Terence Davies
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ALMOST exactly a year after Anton Corbijn's Ian Curtis drama Control arrived on our screens, here comes Steve McQueen's Hunger. Both are unconventional biopics focussing a famous young man who brought about his own demise in the early-80s UK: the central character in Hunger is Bobby Sands (Fassbender), the IRA man who starved himself to death - as a protest against penal conditions - at Northern Ireland's  Maze prison.
   Both movies won acclaim and prizes at Cannes; both are belated feature-film directorial debuts from individuals best known for other areas of the visual arts (McQueen won the Turner Prize for his film and video projections in art-galleries). Both films have resonant, intriguing one-word-noun titles, and their posters feature the protagonist moodily smoking a cigarette. And both films unquestionably herald the arrival of exciting new British-based film-making talents.
   But whereas Control was something of a shattering masterpiece, Hunger 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-planned in every creative aspect, that watching it becomes something of an oppressive ordeal.
   Of course, any film about this particular subject must by its very nature be tough going. The trouble is that McQueen utilises this still-explosive material primarily as a launching-point for an aesthetic exercise - one which comes to have less and less directly to do with Sands or the other characters. 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, to be minutely inspected and explored by ever-curious cameras, and many of the prison-brutality scenes too reminiscent of Hollywood's "trouble in the Big House" genre and its arthouse variants.
   We never, for example, find out why Sands was inside, and we never hear the specifics of the "five demands" which Sands and his colleagues requested in their bid to be treated as political prisoners - a status denied them in life by Mrs Thatcher (present here as a chillingly sonorous disembodied voice), but now implicitly, posthumously granted them by McQueen. These ten men died, horribly, for those demands - is it be asking too much for a 96-minute film on this subject to mention exactly what they were?
  
AT 39, Steve McQueen is at the start of a cinematic career which, just maybe, might one day lead to him no longer being confused with the Hollywood legend (no kin) of the same name. When Terence Davies - director of the week's other big British movie, Of Time and the City - was 39, he was still four years off the release of his own feature-film debut, 1988's Distant Voices, Still Lives. That film, 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.
   Davies 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 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 arguably 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 wonderfully erudite and blazingly personal love-letter (albeit one that's often bracingly sour in tone) to his home town. A kaleidoscope of footage - some shot especially for the film, much of it judiciously extracted from the archives - is accompanied by Davies's 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 elegaic, 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, however, 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
21st October, 2008

written for the current issue of Tribune magazine