Hunger (2008)

12 Years a Slave turned out not to be as convincing as the celebratory reviews made it seem. I reacted rather strongly against Steve McQueen's handling of the material and his strange preoccupation with bodily suffering. In that respect, Hunger is more of the same - more of the same problems, that is. Also here, I found what I would call an almost sadistic fascination with gore and suffering. I could understand such a preoccupation if I would get an impression of a real concern, a desire to reveal a specific side of suffering (like in Dreyer's Jeanne D'arc, to take an obvious example). The setting of Hunger is 1982 North Ireland, a prison and a hunger strike started by IRA men. In itself, this is a promising start. It's just that I feel that McQueen, despite a lengthy conversational scene in which a prisoner and a priest talk to each other about the utility of hunger strikes, does not succeed in bringing out the political context. Or: the political context does not seem to be the main preoccupation here. Perhaps my own lack of background knowledge inhibits my understanding of the film, but I think there's more to it. It's more that I really for my life do not see what kind of pespective on the prisoner's physical torment the film offers. We see the gruesome details of it, but the film keeps an icy distance: it lets us see, but I am not at all sure how I should look. The camera follows Bobby Sands' ordeals, and ultimately, his death, and it is a relentless trail - it is almost as if the hard determination of the prisoner and the guards is mirrored by the camera: it looks and looks. But determination for what? The prisoners' protest, they act, they are represented as disgruntled and resentful. There are merits of the film and those mainly have to do with the form. McQueen pares down the medium of film into a very economic language of images, sounds and very sparse dialogue. The question is, again, to what use McQueen's artistic skills are put. One reviewer writes: "Personally, I was even more impressed with McQueen's ability to wield silence like a painter instinctively aware of which portions of the canvas to leave blank." What worries me is whether Hunger in the end lands in a form of aesthetization where the violence is stylized so much that the only thing left is an isolated reaction in the viewer. In one long scene, as economical as anything else in the film, we see a guard swooping urine down a hallway. The only sound we here is the swooshing and scraping and the only thing we see is the guard approaching us from down the hallway. The scene is painterly, austere almost, but what does it tell us? In what position does it place us?

The Tiger's Tail (2006)

I am quite surprised that I watched The Tiger's Tail (dir. J Boorman) to the end. It's not a very good movie, the acting was embarrassing at times, and the plot was contrived to say the least. A businessman in Dublin is stalked by his twin brother who just looks like him and snatches his successful life from him. Existential drama? No. Comedy? No. Crime story? Not really. Satire about the rich and wealthy whose inner demons turn into real doppelgänger, the underclass coming to haunt the capitalist? Well, maybe, but well, that would be quite a far-fetched reading of the film even though this is a film trying to explain how success is not really the road to happiness (the businessman's son reads Marx and his wife is bored with him and his business goes to hell anyways). - -- - Even some attempts at Irish accents fail.

This must be the place (2011)

Sorrentino again! In This Must be the Place, Sean Penn plays an ageing rock musician (who talks with a lisp, and wears granny glasses), Cheyenne, who initially seems to sleepwalk through his Dubliner life. I couldn't stop thinking of him as a kind of Robert Smith-copy; a person a bit out of step with the present. In the film, Cheyenne undergoes some form of inner change, but it is up to the viewer to decide what change this really is. It is interesting that even though Sorrentino paints with broad streaks (big hallucinatory moment, deadpan jokes, breathtaking locations) he hardly ever drums a specific idea into the viewer's mind. To me, this is a virtue, even though some segments of the film become too disparate and open-ended. The part that deals with Cheyenne's attempt to find the Nazi who tormented his father did not work very well, in my opinion.

What we have here is the familiar story about an alienated rock star, but this picture is drawn into its most surreal corner and the film never dwells on celebrity. In the beginning of the film, he lives in a mansion, spending his days on frozen pizza dinners or contemplating whether he should sell his tesco shares. He hangs out with a teenage fan and also her mother (or that's who I think this woman is). His relationship with his wife is uncomplicated. The death of his father brings him to the US, and the film takes a different turn. Some reviewers have mentioned about Wim Wenders, and yes, as Cheyenne travels to America Wenders' colorful landscapes clearly haunt the film. There is even a blunt reference to Wenders through the appearance of Harry Dean Stanton (yeah!) as a man obsessed with his invention of a suitcase with wheels. But what the film - thankfully - lacks is Wenders' sentimentality. In one of the film's stand-out scenes, Cheyenne has ended up in the home of a young widowed woman and her child. The child puts a guitar on Cheyenne's lap and tells him about this Arcade fire song. No, it's Talking heads, Cheyenne insists. The man plays a quiet guitar melody and the boy sings. It was a heart-warming, gentle moment which had nothing to do with calculation (I think). Byrne himself appears in the film - in a most wonderful way.  

Both here and in Il divo, Sorrentino never lets go of the human as embodied. He has a better sense of small bodily quirks than almost any other contemporary director. I think this is what makes his characters interesting - that they are full-blown beings (their history and so on seem to have only a secondary interest for Sorrentino, and maybe this is why the Nazi hunt part of the film is a bit out of place). For this reason, the contrast between Cheyenne, who is presented as a stranger to/in the world, and his wife Jane, is quite stunning to watch.

This Must be the Place is the kind of film that I wanted to watch again as the end credits were rolling. It's a beautiul film with plenty of funny details.