The Passion of Bobby Sands

Hunger. 2008. Directed by Steve McQueen. Written by Enda Walsh and Steve McQueen. Produced by Laura Hastings-Smith and Robin Gutch. Cinematography by Sean Bobbitt. Edited by Joe Walker. Production design by Tom McCullagh. Music by David Holmes and Leo Abrahams. Sound design by Paul Davies. Costume design by Anushia Nieradzik.

Cast: Michael Fassbender (Bobby Sands), Brian Milligan (Davey Gillen), Liam McMahon (Gerry Campbell), Stuart Graham (Raymond Lohan), Liam Cunningham (Father Dominic Moran), Laine Megaw (Raymond's Wife), Karen Hassan (Gerry's Girlfriend), Frank McCusker (The Governor), Helen Madden (Mrs. Sands), Des McAleer (Mr. Sands), Ciaran Flynn (Twelve Year Old Bobby).

Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen’s impressive feature debut Hunger, screening at this year's New York Film Festival, is not your normal biopic. And that’s a very good thing. McQueen’s film, which won the Camera d'Or (best first film) at this year's Cannes Film Festival, examines the final days of IRA activist and political prisoner Bobby Sands, as he slowly perished from a 66-day hunger strike in 1981, a pivotal event of the “Troubles,” the protracted war involving Northern Ireland’s struggles against the British for independence. After the briefest of opening titles to quickly set the historical background, it becomes immediately clear that McQueen isn’t aiming for the outraged agitprop of, for example, Ken Loach, who also tackled this conflict in his film The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Politics obviously interests McQueen less than the human story being told here. McQueen channels his prodigious visual skills honed from his previous video artworks to astound and assault us with indelible images edited with a nearly unbearable razor’s edge. The film begins not with its putative subject Bobby Sands (he doesn’t even appear until a third of the way into the film), but with prison guard Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham), as he peers with haunted eyes into a mirror, exchanges fraught glances with his fearful wife, washes his bloody knuckles in a sink (the result of years of beating prisoners), and, after carefully checking his car for hidden explosives, drives off to work. Once there, Raymond wanders in a permanent daze, separating himself from the garrulous chatter of his colleagues, and wanders off by himself to have a smoke in the snowy cold.

Much of McQueen’s video art are silent works, and in “Deadpan,” one of his most famous pieces, the artist himself restages a scene from one of Buster Keaton’s films by having the façade of a house falls on top of him, McQueen preserved from harm because he is standing where an open doorway falls. “Deadpan” directly addresses McQueen’s artistic debt to silent cinema, and this style carries over to Hunger. McQueen almost entirely dispenses with dialog in this film, with the major exception of a key scene in the middle of the film (more about that later). Sound and image, especially sound, are given primacy here. The film’s main setting is the notorious Maze prison, where the imprisoned IRA members were kept. The visceral images, mostly involving bodily fluids – blood, urine, excrement – are rendered with stark, tactile immediacy, rubbing the viewers’ faces into the muck and grime of the prison, everything beautifully composed but no less difficult to watch. This filth is directly connected to the main political grievances of the prisoners. Before the hunger strikes (there were actually two major ones; the one depicted in the film was the second and more effective) were two other protests, known as the “blanket” and “no wash” protests. The blanket protest stemmed from the stripping from the prisoners of special political status, which recognized that they were different from common criminals and more akin to prisoners of war, which gave them such rights as free assembly, exemption from work detail, and the right to wear civilian clothes instead of prison uniforms. In protest to the elimination of these rights, which was part of Margaret Thatcher’s unrelentingly hard-line methods, the inmates refused to wear any clothes and would only take blankets to cover themselves. Prison guards retaliated against this action by not allowing them to use the toilets, which led to the “no wash” protests, where the prisoners refused to bathe themselves and urinated and defecated inside their cells, smearing the excrement on the walls. In Hunger the camera lingers on long shots of the cells caked with feces, in one case arranged in a very artful bull’s-eye pattern.

The impact of these protests are given form and character in Hunger in the guise of two prisoners we follow in the film’s early scenes. Davey Gillen (Brian Milligan), a new prisoner, is shown the ropes by cellmate Gerry Campbell (Liam MacMahon), and through their experience, we are witness to the excruciating details of brutal life in the prison, in the scenes where the prisoners are forcibly removed from their cells and washed down and their hair savagely cut, with bloody chunks of scalp taken off with it. They pass messages and other items with visitors from outside the prison by hiding and transporting them through various bodily orifices. This illustrates the film’s major theme: the body, specifically the male body, as the vessel and site of resistance to authority. Often stripped naked, beaten and dragged through the corridors by the prison guards, their bodies are literally all they have, and the hunger strike becomes the ultimate form of self-sacrifice and martyrdom to their cause. These methods recall such disparate phenomena as those who immolated themselves to protest the Vietnam War, and (for of course very different reasons) present day suicide bombers. Considering that McQueen and his co-screenwriter Enda Walsh began writing their script well before the Iraq War, Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib, the present-day parallels are even more remarkably prescient.

After following the two prisoners, we are introduced rather offhandedly to Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), as he is visited by his parents. This serves to ground him and counteract against seeing him as a special person and reinforce the fact that as celebrated (and notorious) as Sands was, he was part of a movement that was much larger than one person. Bobby Sands also, as with the first two prisoners in the film, is subjected to prison brutality, undergoing a vicious cavity search by the guards. Yet there is something singular about Sands, and he does consciously see himself as a symbol. The rest of the film demonstrates this, and quite surprisingly, it reveals itself as very Catholic work, and Sands emerges as a Christ figure. An irreverent, indeed sacrilegious one, to be sure (he rips up his copy of the Bible to use as rolling papers for his cigarettes), but a Christ figure nonetheless. The suffering and physical deterioration of Sands’ hunger strike render this in intricate detail, the sores on his skin looking like nothing less than stigmata.

Sands directly argues the rationale behind his decision to go on the hunger strike in an extraordinary scene in the center of the film, in which he debates a visiting priest (Liam Cunningham) over the wisdom and effectiveness of the strike. After virtually no dialog up to that point, we are confronted with an avalanche of speech as the two men verbally parry in their dialectical debate. Sands is uncompromising in his refusal to negotiate or settle for less than the full reinstatement of their special political status, while the priests stresses the importance of compromise. Their conversation is filmed in a side view of the two men in profile, in a static shot that runs about ten minutes. It represents a breather from the stark violence and an opportunity for the viewer to reflect on the greater meaning of this struggle, and indeed, what it really means to die for a cause.

Unconvinced by the priest’s arguments, Sands goes through with the hunger strike, in which nine other prisoners died. The film focuses on Sands, as he slowly deteriorates, eventually unable to get around without help, as his vision and hearing fail him, and as he begins seeing visions of himself as a young boy appear to him. Again like Christ, he resists the temptations put before him, this time of the plates of food that loom before the camera, as Sands turns away, hurtling toward certain death with steel-like resolve. As he dies, Sands’ image is superimposed with a flock of birds, representing the freedom that death has given him, a rather trite and clichéd image that is the film’s only misstep.

While the sight of a man wasting away from starvation is no one’s idea of a fun night out at the movies, Hunger rewards those able to endure the extreme imagery with a compelling artistic vision. McQueen’s images (aided by Sean Bobbitt’s precisely rendered cinematography) have a cold beauty that forms a striking contrast to the grimness (and griminess) of their content. McQueen, unlike other visual artists transitioning to cinema, has a sure hand with the form, especially in working with his actors. Michael Fassbender (best known to U.S. audiences from Zack Snyder’s 300) as Sands especially impresses in his scene with the priest and in navigating the physical challenges of his role (he clearly actually fasted for the film’s latter scenes).

Hunger screens on September 27 and 28 at the New York Film Festival, and will open in early 2009.

Review: Andrea Arnold's "Red Road"

Red Road. 2006. Written and directed by Andrea Arnold, based on characters created by Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen. Produced by Carrie Comerford. Cinematography by Robbie Ryan. Edited by Nicolas Chauderge. Production design by Helen Scott. Costume design by Helen Scott. Sound design by Nicolas Becker. Released by Tartan Films.

Cast: Kate Dickie (Jackie), Tony Curran (Clyde), Martin Compston (Stevie), Nathalie Press (April), Andrew Armour (Alfred), John Comerford (Man With Dog), Paul Higgins (Avery).

Andrea Arnold’s debut film Red Road is a fascinating cinematic mélange: equal parts Rear Window and Blow-Up, updated with evocations of post-9/11 surveillance and filmed using the techniques of Dogma-style direct cinema. Red Road is the first film of the “Advance Party Concept,” conceived by Lars von Trier’s Dogma cohorts Lone Sherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen, which consists of three films by three different directors set in Scotland using the same set of characters. Red Road, which won the Grand Prix du Jury (third place) Prize at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, is a moody and often disturbing film that gets this endeavor off to a very strong start.

Jackie (Kate Dickie) is a uniformed operator at a closed-circuit surveillance firm hired to watch the Red Road housing projects, a litter-strewn and graffiti-covered residence which gives the film its name. She spends her workday seated in front of a bank of monitors, watching the citizens’ daily lives. This is the ultimate reality television, her professional voyeurism highlighting the drabness of her own life. She lives alone in a small, cheerless apartment. Her face is drawn and hardened, and she seems to experience little joy. She carries on a desultory affair with a married coworker, their sexual contact relegated to quickies inside the company van. We are given little backstory to her character, which has the effect of drawing us in. One day Jackie watches a man and a woman have sex on her cameras. Zooming in on the action, she treats this occurrence as a private porno movie, unzipping her pants. She is stopped short when she recognizes the man on the monitor.

The man is Clyde (Tony Curran), an ex-con who has a connection to Jackie’s past. The film gains its intensity from its teasing misdirection about the nature of this connection. Jackie frantically calls her lawyer, and finds out Clyde has been released early from prison for good behavior. The immediate conclusion one draws is that Clyde has raped her, and at first all indications seem to point to this explanation. However, we are forced to question this, and the film takes many twists and turns as we understand that all is not what it seems.

Jackie begins shadowing this mysterious (to us) person, watching his every move on the monitors and leaving work to follow him on the street. Her obsession grows to such an extent that she neglects her work, the most disturbing instance concerning a young girl stabbed without her noticing because she is so distracted by watching Clyde. Jackie insinuates herself into Clyde’s existence, slipping into his apartment building and crashing a party he is throwing for his friends. Clyde is immediately attracted to Jackie and begins slow dancing with her, until she breaks away from him and runs out of the apartment. Clyde suspects that he may have known her before, but can’t recall where. Jackie also gets close to Clyde’s roommates Stevie (Martin Compton) and April (Natalie Press). The relationship between these two adds another intriguing layer to the proceedings.

Arnold’s film is an intense modern revenge tragedy that, while somewhat overpraised, nevertheless is a very strong work that explores issues of modern-day surveillance and the complex interplay of rage and desire. The film features impressive camerawork from cinematographer Robbie Ryan which effectively conveys the paranoia and melancholy of the piece. Kate Dickie is especially fine in her first film role, beautifully registering the mysteries and transformations of her character. Although the Advance Party Concept, much like the Dogma 95 mini-movement which spawned it, has more than a whiff of gimmickry about it, if this first installment is any indication, we are in for two very good films to follow.

Red Road opens in New York on April 13 at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and the Landmark Sunshine Cinema.

Red Road trailer:

In Darkest Africa

Earlier today, I caught up with The Last King of Scotland, Kevin Macdonald's adaptation of Giles Foden's novel that is centered around the brutal Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. It screened at the Walter Reade Theater as part of a tribute to Forest Whitaker, who gives a magisterial performance as the wily, charming, and evil Amin, and shows us in a chilling manner how these qualities can coexist in the same man. Whitaker, who recently took home a Golden Globe for his performance, is more than deserving of the fulsome praise he has received so far. Ever since his breakout role in Scorsese's The Color of Money, he has quietly become one of the world's finest actors. From his first scene in the film, in which he pumps up a massive crowd at a rally ("You can oh yeah!"), Whitaker is an electric screen presence as seductive to us in the audience as he is to the feckless Scottish do-gooder he takes under his wing, played by James McAvoy.

So as I say, Whitaker is as brilliant as everyone says. It's what surrounds him that I find highly problematic. Amin is not the main character of either the film or the novel, but instead the film's protagonist, the one we as audience members are invited to sympathize with, is Nicholas Garrigan, a naive, impulsive, and quite stupid Scottish med-school graduate who, looking for a place to practice medicine, picks Uganda at random by spinning a globe and pointing a finger (after first landing on Canada and quickly spinning again). Garrigan, who is picked by Amin to be his personal physician, is apparently a composite character made up of a number of white advisors who were complicit in keeping Amin in power, even as he systematically murdered his own people by the thousands.

However, this insistence of seeing Amin and the events in Uganda through the eyes of this white observer, which is a typical strategy of films that use Africa as its subject, Blood Diamond being the most recent example, serves to render hazy the origins and the specifics of the colonialist legacy and tribal conflicts that conspire to create a figure such as Amin. We walk away from the film no more enlightened about Amin or Uganda than we were when we went in. Yes, Amin was a bad, bad guy, but was there any doubt of that? Is that all Macdonald's film has to say?

Also, I personally find it rather insulting that so many films about Africa (and this is true of other non-Western cultures depicted in films) seem to feel that the audience requires a surrogate to translate the events for us, as if everyone in the audience is white (which is certainly not true in my case). Through the eyes of this usually horrified observer, we are invited to tsk-tsk and say, "isn't that horrible?" And then the credits roll, we throw away our popcorn, and we are no longer required to reflect or do our own thinking, since the filmmakers have presumably already done that for us.

And using such a self-absorbed, thoughtless, and purposely blind character, who makes incredibly stupid moves such as sleeping with one of the wives of his murderous dictator boss (!), truly puts the white surrogate strategy to its ultimate test. In the film's second half, Amin becomes more and more relegated to the background, as the bills come due on Garrigan's dumb mistakes. The film becomes increasingly overheated as the hellish consequences of Amin's desperation and paranoia come to full fruition, and the camerawork of Anthony Dod Mantle (the great Dogma cinematographer) illustrates a Dantean maelstrom, as the bodies (often hacked and mutilated) pile up.

But all this sound and fury generates much more heat than it does light, and in the end, Whitaker's masterful work is put in the service of yet another simplistic, despairing, and unenlightening depiction of Africa. Correctives to this are sorely needed, and luckily there are quite a few available. I refer you to the works of, for example, Senegal's Ousmane Sembene, or Mali's great filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako, whose intellectually and emotionally satisfying Bamako, about the impact of the IMF and the World Bank on Africa, opens at the Film Forum on February 14. I saw this film last year at the New York Film Festival, and Sissako's film deals with the issue of Africa's misery in a complex, rigorous, and formally inventive way, as opposed to Macdonald's film which doesn't even attempt such a task.

Also, if you want to see the real Idi Amin on film, and you're in the New York area, then make your way to the Museum of the Moving Image, where on February 9 and 10, Barbet Schroeder's celebrated documentary General Idi Amin Dada will screen as part of the New York Film Critics Circle's series "Critics Choice: Great Documentaries." More info can be found here.

Last King of Scotland trailer: