Two Contemporary Hells
by TKrause
- Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen, and Gomorrah, directed by Matteo Garrone, both at the IFC Center.
Hunger and Gomorrah, two films now showing at the IFC Center, offer grim, unsparing views of the human condition – a kind of Platonically perfect “bad vibes” double feature, if you will, a downbeat, unsettling night (or series of nights) at the cinema. Both are topical, both are necessary, and both are difficult, endlessly rewarding, viewing experiences.
Steve McQueen’s Hunger tells the story of Bobby Sands (played with rare intensity by Michael Fassbender) and his fellow Irish Republican Army members, who, as captives of the British, staged a hunger strike in 1981 that eventually ended in Sands’ death. It is a quiet triumph of a movie, a harrowing and eminently lucid film that portrays violence and suffering movingly but not sensationally, with a calmness and depth of focus that shows pain, and the body’s experience of pain, in all its horrific detail. The film starts with two main plotlines: one shows policeman Ray Lohan (Stuart Graham) going to work, methodically dressing, checking his car for bombs, and, finally, beating IRA prisoners in several brutally visceral scenes; the second plotline narrates the prisoners’ story, focusing first on a new prisoner, Davey (a haunted Brian Milligan), and then moving on to Bobby Sands, the leader of the prisoners: an unlikely hero, part tortured saint, part simple Catholic man from the North.
Hunger moves us slowly into the world of Long Kesh prison, first showing the everyday routines of men, guards and prisoners alike, living and working among extraordinary squalor, bloodshed, and fear. We see the IRA prisoners huddled under blankets, refusing to wear prison uniforms, the walls of their cells smeared with feces, the floors running with urine, all attempts to rebuke the cruelty of their guards and the aloofness of the British government; we see, through Lohan’s eyes, the regimented world of the guards, all barracks camaraderie and dirty jokes, with only slight revelations – such as Lohan’s perpetually scarred knuckles, cut time and again on the bodies of his prisoners – of the daily violence at Long Kesh. It was especially shocking to watch the guards’ scenes on the day the Obama Administration released the Bush torture memoranda; or, today, to think about these scenes while typing this review, just having read of further developments in the case of Ian Tomlinson, who was walking home from work during the London G-20 protests, and who died after he was beaten by the police.
Tomlinson did not die, as was originally thought, from a heart attack but from internal injuries after having been attacked from behind and knocked down to the ground by a policeman in full riot gear. Not the least of Hunger’s successes is its ability to speak to two worlds at once, the world of the events that it depicts, and the world outside the theater, in which similar events daily proliferate: the film thus functions as a mirror, not just for the dark times of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but for our own troubled, darkened times as well.
The topicality of Hunger, however, pales before its luminous cinematic style. McQueen fills the screen with delicate, atmospheric touches, and uses generously long takes in portraying the prisoners’ resistance to the guards’ abuses. These quiet stretches are punctuated by episodes of viciousness and depravity that are shocking not only in their unflinching specificity – Sands’ forced haircut, administered by Lohan, whose bloody scissors keep cutting off bits of Sands’ skin; the gauntlet of armored, Perspex-shielded riot police through which the prisoners, naked, on all fours, must pass, as the riot police hit them mercilessly with their fists and nightsticks – but also in their near-balletic choreography, McQueen’s exquisitely composed shots and sweeping camera rendering the unthinkable violence a beautiful, horrifying, disturbing spectacle.
McQueen has been faulted for the more aestheticized elements of his presentation of the prisoners’ ordeal – rightfully, I think, for using numerous, not-so-subtle Christological symbols and motifs when depicting Sands and others, which at times feel unerringly right (as with the unexpected pieta following Lohan’s murder by an IRA gunman), but other times fall flat (as with some of the more obvious Sands-as-Christ moments). But McQueen’s constancy of method and purpose succeeds more often than not, as with the film’s spectacular set piece, a fifteen-minutes-plus dialogue between Sands and his priest, Father Moran (played with steely reserve by Liam Cunningham), which brings Sands’ history, as well as his motivations for the hunger strike, to the fore. While scarifying, the film is edifying as well, the pity and fear it evokes transformed into a widening of the viewer’s experience, a greater knowledge through art of the extremes of human life. As a friend pointed out, Hunger is loosely structured on Dante’s Commedia, with the hell of the prisoners’ cells and the Long Kesh torture chambers giving way to the purgatorial catechism between Sands and Father Moran, and finally ending in the paradoxical paradise of Sands’ death from starvation, the dank prison cell traded for antiseptic hospital whites, mock-angelic doctors and their instruments in place of demonic guards and their bludgeons, and, throughout, Sands’ suffering, stoic nobility: a vision of unmediated darkness that yields stubbornly, bit by bit, to images of beauty and grace at its end.
Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah, on the other hand, is pure hell. I hated almost every minute I spent watching Gomorrah, and suffered many kinds of viewerly torture – profuse sweating, nausea, rapid heartbeat, and other symptoms of an incipient panic attack – which is something of a cinematic triumph, a testament to the filmmakers’ intent and its realization: a “mob” movie that revels in crime and violence while offering an unblinking critique of society’s (including moviegoers’) complicity in, and consumption of, the same. A meta-mob, meta-crime movie, then, as devoted to the causes and effects of violence as it is its bloody, spectacular depiction, Garrone’s film explores the world of the Naples Mafia, or Camorra, while simultaneously using the hydra-headed crime syndicate as a metaphor for the rapaciousness of unfettered free-market globalization. Gomorrah’s unsettling double vision is announced in its opening scene, in which unnamed underworld soldiers encoffin themselves in the luminous tubes of tanning beds. We see their near-nakedness at length, an almost touching nod to their humanity – a catalogue of sagging flesh and bad homemade tattoos – until the inevitable happens, and the fake-sunbathing thugs are summarily dispatched, their bodies ripped open, like the viewers’ ears, by a cascade of gunshots from offscreen. We are at first transfixed by the extreme close-ups and unmoving camera eye, with the long takes given to each dreaming mobster forcing us to gaze, for what feels like forever, on their soon-to-be-violated bodies; the violence done, we are left to consider the ideologies, social and aesthetic, that allow for such violence and, perhaps more importantly, allow for its representations – as commodities, sites of knowledge and discourse, as targets for our affections and as repositories for our collective memories.
Gomorrah borrows from the “multiple-and-reinforcing-narratives” school of contemporary cinema to tell four separate-but-thematically-interconnected stories. We meet Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato), a bagman and all-around courier for the syndicate who finds himself adrift in the increasingly violent world of his young competitors and associates; Pasquale (the dignified Salvatore Cantalupo), a Camorra tailor with a near-magical gift with textiles who, in need of money, contemplates working for competing Chinese factories, risking death if caught; young Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese), a street kid working for the Camorra who loyally, dumbly serves his bosses like a hungry dog its master; and, finally, the would-be killer duo, Tony-Montana-quoting thug team of Marco (Marco Macor) and Sweet Pea (Ciro Petrone), who represent the new criminal generation at its most feral and dangerous, and who provide the film with its most outlandish gangster-kids-on-crack moments. Each of the narratives dramatizes the plight of the human pawns drawn into the Camorra’s ever-widening ambit, the dominant motif being one of mortification: the turning of people into tools, the crushing of normative human values and social relationships, and the senseless waste of life in the pursuit of wealth and objects. Throughout Gomorrah uses the visual motif of an underworld – the weapons cache found by Marco and Sweet Pea that eventually dooms them; the vast, multi-tiered Piranesian prisons of the housing projects where Totò lives (a bravura scene shows a wedding on one level, drug running on another), and through which Don Ciro flits like a forgotten ghost – constantly reinforcing its vision of global capitalism as hell on earth for all save a few. At times Gomorrah seems like the unfolding of some brutal atavistic ritual from pagan times, a violent, bloody offering to some inscrutable god, as in the film’s last shot, which shows the bodies of Marco and Sweet Pea carried away by a bulldozer, whose mechanical arms and bucket hold the corpses aloft while a still-active Mount Vesuvius lowers threateningly in the background. At other times Gomorrah feels like an unwanted-yet-privileged glimpse of an apocalyptic future, with the survivors of some unnameable cataclysm living in the warrens of bombed-out megalopolises, reduced to the level of tribal organization and morality, all laws gone but the laws of survival and naked necessity, with violence, hunger, fear, and death ruling capriciously over prostrate humanity. Gomorrah is neither, of course – it’s both “just a movie” and a movie, however stylized, about “real life, right now,” not a prophecy or myth or some futuristic parable. But it’s a testament to Garrone’s strengths as a filmmaker that even the most realistic moments of the film burn with an infernal, otherworldly intensity.
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