Review of Steve McQueens movies 'Hunger' (2008) and 'Shame' (2011)

In anticipation of tomorrow's premiere of 12 Years as a Slave I wanted to write about Steve McQueens earlier movies Hunger (2008) and Shame (2011).  A word of warning, those movies are difficult, emotionally exhausting and brutally explicit in recreating the plot, there are moments that are almost unbearable to watch (especially in Hunger), so if you are depressed or very emotional steer clear from them. I personally love them both and thus can't wait to see 12 Years a Slave. Some spoilers ahead.

Hunger (2008) is a movie about Irish hunger strike that happened in 1981, a bit of history background first : The 1981 Irish hunger strike was the culmination of a five-year protest by Irish republican prisoners in Northern Ireland. The protest began as the blanket protest in 1976, when the British government withdrew Special Category Status for convicted paramilitary prisoners. In 1978, after a number of attacks on prisoners, the dispute escalated into the dirty protest, where prisoners refused to leave their cells to wash and covered the walls of their cells with excrement. In 1980, seven prisoners participated in the first hunger strike, which ended after 53 days. Movie focuses on the second hunger strike which took place in 1981, its starts of with arrival of new prisoner Davy Gillen and by observing his treatment we find out about the conditions of living in the prison and about the way guards treat the inmates, violence, humiliation and total dehumanization are the daily elements of life and  McQueen shows them in great detail . Later focus shifts and we meet Bobby Sands played by truly mesmerizing Michael Fassbender, Bobby is the leader among the prisoners, when the negotiations with British Government fail and he and and his fellow prisoners get brutally beaten for refusing to wear clothes he decides to start a hunger strike. There is a long sequence showing Bobby meeting with Father Dominc Moran (Rory Mullen), discussing morality of the strike and tracing sources of his conviction to his experiences as a child, the whole scene is a showpiece of Fassbender's amazing acting skills.
The transformation that Fassbender undergoes to show  how body changes when you are starving yourself  to death is truly horrifying, he looks like a skeleton covered with skin that rips in places forming blisters and sores, it makes you want  to cry, by the end his character is so frail they have to put a frame over his body before they cover him with a sheet. During his last days Bobby Sands was elected as a Member of Parliament, prompting media interest from around the world. The strike was called off after ten prisoners had starved themselves to death—including Sands.Shortly afterwards, the British government conceded in one form or another virtually all of the prisoners' demands despite never officially granting political status.
When you watch this movie you can't believe that the situation it shows happened only 30 years ago, because the treatment of the prisoners looks like something from long before the European Convention on Human Rights (1953), the sad thing is that in many prisons around the world this still the norm. The different way guards behaved inside ad outside the prison walls got me thinking about the Stanford experiment( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_experiment ) so if you want to see where it could of led if it hadn't been stopped watch Hunger.

In Shame (2012) McQueen again reaches for a difficult topic this time it's sexual addiction, but this is only the surface because underneath this is a movie about alienation, loneliness and inability to sustain normal human relations which seems to be the plague of the modern world. Michael Fssbender plays Brandon seemingly successful, modern 30 something man living in New York, but from the first look at him we know somethings wrong, he watches women with the tension and obsession, his apartment is cold and sterile, there is nothing personal except of his laptop, later we see him with prostitute and find out that he is in fact a sex addict. His life is totally taken over by the need to release tension, he exist from one orgasm to another and is slowly loosing control battle with his addiction, the whole situation spirals out of control when his equally damaged and emotionally needy sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) comes to visit, her presence disrupts his almost ritualistic sexual routine and brings back some bad memories. There is nothing erotic about sex in this movie, no emotion, no closeness, Brandon tries to build a relationship with his coworker but  when they are intimate together he cant perform which leaves him in a state of distress, he realizes that his integral human bonding abilities for intimacy are severely damaged if not nonexistent. McQueen's movies don't have much dialogue they base on actors abilities to show emotions with their body language and facial expressions and Fassbender is absolutely fantastic at this, Carey Mulligan is also very good. Shame doesn't have a definite ending it leaves you wondering what will become of the two main characters.