With all the hype right now surrounding "12 Years A Slave" and it's Oscar triumph, I decided to check out Steve McQueen's first film, despite my dislike of his other two. "Hunger" got a lot of positive attention when it came out, particularly for Michael Fassbinder's performance. The movie is about Bobby Sands of the IRA and his hunger strike. In it, Fassbinder literally wastes away (under a doctor's supervision) so as to show us a malnourished body in full glory.
Which is a freak show conceit. Something really unnecessary in my book. What pornography is to sex, McQueen's films are to human misery. It amplifies it, and then thrusts it into your face.
As a film, this is all about that freakshow performance, and self-conscious artiness. Impressive wordless sequences, well-photographed. An extremely long dialogue scene (ten minutes or so) delivered by two actors shown from a single-camera shot without a cut. This isn't a drama, it's a still-life portriat that invites us to reflect on the anger of the hunger strikers, and the way that anger manifested itself turned inwards. In bones protruding from skin, and lesions and blood sores.
This guy's films just aren't for me. He's a director (Michael Haneke is another) who is going to keep putting out technically well-made films that garner attention from critics, and occasionally incite social dialogue, but which I will never enjoy. His whole trip is to dwell on human misery, not in a naturalistic way but in a way that celebrates the extremes of human behavior. At core it's obvious to me that he's sadistic and that he entered the world of film so as to satisfy his core urge of making us all want to wince and gag.
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