“Hunger” (2008)
Director Steve McQueen (“12 Years a Slave”), with his background in art, arrived a fully formed, fully gifted filmmaker with this tiny but mighty debut film. Telling its story mostly through brutal, haunting imagery (though there is that justly famous tour-de-force 15 minute one-take dialogue scene), McQueen gives the viewer the absolute minimum needed to set up this interpretation of the events surrounding the Irish Republican Army’s 1981 hunger strike led by Bobby Sands. So rather than a by-the-numbers biopic, the film deals as much in the philosophy of the story as the politics. Yet “Hunger” also evokes its time and place, putting us inside the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland in the early 80s, and immersing the viewer so successfully in the smells, sights and sounds of the prison that you feel you’re sitting in on every scene, whether as an observer or hurled right into the action. Featuring a breakout Michael Fassbender, “Hunger” is grim and visceral, but it doesn’t punish the audience, and it’s simply too artfully constructed to be labeled as depressing. It shows the body as a political tool, yet deals in ideas about sacrifice, idealism in the face of oppression and the toll resistance takes on all sides.
“Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1985)
Despite picking up 4 Oscar nominations, being the first independent film nominated for Best Picture, and winning the Best Actor statue for William Hurt, Hector Babenco‘s “Kiss of the Spider Woman” has somewhat fallen off the radar in the years since. And that’s unfortunate, because despite uneven elements (particularly the sections reimagining old films noir), it’s still a remarkable film that’s precisely germane to the topic of incarceration, while also providing heady provocative arguments on the value of escapism, especially storytelling, and escapist Hollywood filmmaking in particular. Luis (Hurt) and Valentin (Raul Julia) are cellmates in a South American prison. Luis is flamboyant but frightened, a gay man imprisoned for sex with an underage boy; Valentin is jailed for his radical politics, and pines for the woman he loved but could never have. As the film unfolds it suggests that movies, politics and love are all analogous in connecting us to one another in meaningful, even transcendent ways. But its most striking moral, and one that predates “The Shawshank Redemption“‘s more literal take, is that no matter how small the cell, friendship, even forged in the unlikeliest of places between diametrically opposed people, is its own kind of liberation.
“Le Trou” (1960)
The last film French crime filmmaker Jacques Becker would ever direct — he died a few weeks after the film wrapped — “Le Trou” (translated in English as “The Hole”) is a methodical prison movie, almost a rigorous procedural about confinement and escape and in this regard its reminiscent of Bresson’s “A Man Escaped.” The picture centers on young man (Michel Marcel of Jacques Demy’s “Lola”) who is forced to switch jail cells while awaiting trial. Upon entering his new oubliette he is welcomed by four prisoners who have been planning an elaborate escape for months, and are forced to include the new inmate. While Becker’s film centers around humanist qualities of fraternity, camaraderie (this is the kind of jail you want to be sent to, frankly) and ultimately, betrayal, much of the movie silently focuses on the breakout employing long dialogue-less takes of digging, hammering, cutting. And in these exacting sequences often evoke a riveting intensity. Also using non-professional actors, it’s difficult to not compare the film to Bresson’s similar picture, but if Becker’s picture falls somewhat short (a twist ending of treachery that comments on the moral individuality of convicts doesn’t land as hard as it should) “Le Trou” is still a demanding prison movie well worth the watch.
“A Man Escaped” (1956)
Based on the memoirs of André Devigny, who escaped from Fort Montluc in Lyon in 1943, legendary French auteur Robert Bresson also mined his own experiences as a POW for this outright masterpiece. Intense, breathlessly suspenseful and yet perhaps one of the quietest and most minimalist “thrillers” ever made, it’s so assured in its procedural approach, and so clean in its lines, that you can’t quite see where Bresson hides all that magic. On one side of a wall lie Nazi soldiers with their pistols; on the other side sits a ravaged man (an unforgettable Francois Leterrier), almost reduced to an abstraction of the simple will to survive. Told in whispers and glances and painstakingly minute scratches at a door panel, the quietude in “A Man Escaped” is unnerving. And while the film can be an almost excruciating study of incarceration, it is also an illuminating and deeply felt examination of the interior self — the more so for giving us so little direct interior information. Divinity and religion are staples in his work, but despite not dealing with them head-on, the austere silences here feel saturated with humanist philosophy: it may be the holiest of Bresson experiences.
“Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence” (1983)
Simply one of the weirdest films ever made about war or prison, this movie from Japanese provocateur Nagisa Oshima (the filmmaker behind notoriously queasy erotic drama “In the Realm of the Senses“) is best approached as a bewildering, indulgent and often frustratingly opaque arthouse title, rather than the triumph-over-adversity mashup of “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Stalag 17” it’s somewhat billed as. But it does provide a unique take on the psychology of the jailer/prisoner relationship, in the homoerotically-charged sado-masochism of the interactions between David Bowie’s Celliers and Ryuichi Sakamoto‘s Yonoi. Depending on your standpoint, it’s either marred or enlivened by a clash of acting styles: between the underplaying, warm-eyed Tom Conti, Bowie, whose character is almost more an alien than when he played one, and the Japanese contingent which also features Beat Takeshi, who crushes it in the film’s manipulative but undeniably effective ending. But it’s certainly an interesting clash, and that’s needed, because at over two hours the film can feel like an endurance test of its own, and yet it’s hard to shake off, with certain powerful scenes and images lingering long after, and Sakamoto’s most valuable contribution probably coming not in his performance, but his amazing, anachronistic ’80s synth score.