First up Hunger, a film about Bobby Sands and the IRA hunger-strike in the early 1980s, directed by British artist Steve McQueen. This provocative film won the Camera D'Or at Cannes this year, and deservedly so, in my opinion. The film is constructed as three parts. The first depicts the vast array of participants who contributed to the IRA protests in the Maze prison: prison guards, IRA prisoners who'd been inside for a while, new prisoners, specially brought-in riot squads. While there is background chatter in this first section, little dialogue distracts from the focal characters in it - who range from a paranoid prison guard, who checks his car out for bombs every morning before going to work, to a newly-recruited riot policeman, who can't bear the animalistic brutality with which his squad abuses the prisoners, to a new IRA prisoner, who is inducted into the prison regime and the prisoners' attempts to both protest against and subvert it. McQueen was apparently inspired in his depictions of the prison - not the actual Maze, in which he was refused permission to film - by the nightmarish war paintings of Velazquez and Goya. They seem to have provided a suitably hellish guide, as these scenes were often disturbing and repellent (especially when the prisoners were on dirty protest). The brutalising regime of the prison spills onto the streets as the paranoid prison guard is later randomly shot in the head in a reprisal attack while he is visiting his senile mother at a nursing home. Section two is a roughly 20-min conversation between Bobby Sands and his priest about the repercussions of the planned hunger strike. The viewer is held at arms-length, watching the two in profile in the middle-distance. This scene is by turns darkly funny and disturbing, as the priest questions Bobby's desire to die (as opposed to protest) and his ability to make a rational judgement - even against the orders of the IRA command - in the prison environment. With a steely and intransigent logic, Bobby lays out his reasons why and they are not open for negotiation. The last, and possibly most disquieting, section depicts Bobby wasting away in the prison hospital, covered in sores, skeletal and barely conscious. Several people had walked out of the cinema at this stage and someone in front of me had a dizzy spell and couldn't watch the scenes of his physical decay.
There were many sobering aspects to this film: the visceral and sometimes beautiful visual imagery, the challenging moral questions, and the historical parallels to present-day responses to terrorism. One of the aspects that stuck out for me was imperious tones of Margaret Thatcher - blaring out in snatches from radios and TVs - and Britain's intransigent response to the hunger-strikers' desire to be granted the status of political prisoners. While the politics and morality of the situation can certainly be debated, it was salutary reminder both of what a poisonous witch this woman was (the same person who called Pinochet 'a friend to Britain') and just how much contemporary Britain is defined by imperialism. Another aspect was that it certainly didn't romanticise the IRA. I heard some idiot say on the way out of the cinema, 'I'm glad they got the prison-guard', for all the world as if he'd just been to see an action movie. What's noble about shooting someone in the back of the head? I see nothing to cheer on in a situation that brutalises people to the point where starving themselves seems the only rational choice. But I certainly don't want to make it sound like I have the answers here. Just that this film had a really big impact on me. It's not an easy film to see, but well worth it.
Well, I seem to have written lots about the first film so I will try and be briefer about the other two. I Just Didn't Do It is another prison film, in a sense, though, I stress, very different to the other. The main character, Kaneko Teppei, is (wrongly) arrested for groping a girl on a packed commuter train. Instead of pleading guilty and getting off with a small fine, he insists that he didn't do it and so enters the Kafka-esque nightmare of the Japanese justice system. Apparently, according to the film at least, Japan has a 99.9% conviction rate, so the likelihood of getting acquitted for pleading innocent was remote. However, his legal support team persevere through numerous hearings, re-constructions and Judge-changes, highs, lows, and almost-certain acquittal, only for Kaneko to be convicted in the end. No happy-ending American court-room drama here. An engrossing, if slow-moving, drama, played with understatement and appropriate bewilderment.
Moving along at a cracking pace now! Last up for this post is the swashbuckling epic that is the Russian-Kazak-Mongolian-German film, Mongol. This was great - what Braveheart could have been without Mel Gibson's shampoo-ad hairdo and the cheesy romantic story-line. The film covers the period from when Temudgin (aka Genghis Khan) is a child to the point where, as young Khan, he unites all the Mongol tribes. Aged 10, Temudgin rides with his chieftain father to choose a bride from a neighbouring tribe. He meets a feisty young girl that he takes a shine to on the way and cunningly engineers a scheme to choose her for his bride. On the way home, his father, obeying the traditional Mongol customs, drinks poisoned milk offered by an enemy and dies. Cue carnage and insecurity, as the Khan-apparent is imprisoned and brutalised in the power vacuum that ensues. However, he maintains an extraordinary self-belief and holds fast to his customs and beliefs, in the process not forgetting those who have been kind or loyal to him. He eventually marries his chosen bride, although they are repeatedly separated. Giving the lie to the adage, 'the thing a Mongol needs above all else is a horse', she comes to his rescue when he is imprisoned, seemingly for good, in a neighbouring kingdom. After his release, the scourge of half the world is on course to unite the Mongol tribes and rampage across Asia. The battle scenes were absolutely brilliant - a thoroughly enjoyable film if historical war-like epics are your thing. I understand that this is the first part of a trilogy - can't wait to see the next two!
The film festival comes to an end this weekend and we have one more left to see. Coming up in the final film post: Let the Right One In, The Wave and Waltz with Bashir.
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