Hunger

I went to see Hunger at a festival, and was left speechless. It took me a couple of days to fully digest the film. Hunger,both in its original manifestation as a 1890's novel by Knut Hamsun,and in this modernized version, is a parable of the human ego as itmakes the agonizing journey to confront reality, both on the grittylevel of survival and on the more esoteric level, which Andrew Harvey,Sufi scholar, describes as the place where the soul is, "burnt alive...mocked, derided, lacerated, opened up by visionary ecstasy.." And so the reason I reacted with such passion to this movie is simply that it is true; a thrilling and visually beautiful rendering of a profound truth. Maria Geise gets credit, not only for recognizing the beauty of the message in Knut Hamsun's masterpiece, but for bringing it to the screen in such an alarming, visceral, and scrappy (not in the sense of "fragmented", but in the sense of "a fighting spirit"),way.

I thought long and hard before coming up with the term to describe Joseph Culp's brilliant portrayal of the down-and-out screenwriter. It is nothing less than Chaplinesque--the character he gives us is at once endearing, annoying, pathetic,and deeply profound.

This is a movie for anyone who has dug deeply into the pockets of the soul and come up empty-handed. That would be all of us.