Film correspondent Michael Dwyergives his verdict on 'Hunger', the film about Bobby Sands which premiered at Cannes yesterday.
TAKING ON A HIGHLY emotive and politically charged subject, British artist Steve McQueen has produced a thoughtfully considered and firmly unflinching drama in his first feature film, Hunger. In dealing with the 10 IRA hunger strikers who took their protest to the death in 1981, the film prompts the viewer to reflect on how events reached that impasse and how we somehow got from there to the peace process.
Hungerbegins on a close-up on a man's bruised knuckles as he prepares for another day's work as a prison officer. We suspect, correctly, that his injuries were caused by punching prisoners.
The incarceration of a new prisoner Davey Gillen allows the film to outline the regime while the IRA men are on their blanket protest to be allowed wear their own clothes and to restore special category status. Margaret Thatcher's voice is heard, insisting there will be "no political status".
Gillen is put in a filthy cell where the walls are smeared with excrement. We see how messages are smuggled, and how the prisoners use Mass as a chance to talk among themselves. We witness the violent consequences when prisoners riot and they walk a gauntlet of fists and batons before being strip searched.
And we meet Bobby Sands without being told why he's behind bars. About halfway into the film there is a sense of relief when it moves outside these claustrophobic confines, but that respite is short-lived when the scene ends in the cold-blooded murder of a prison officer.
The style of the film alters significantly when Sands has an extended conversation with a priest. The camera remains static as they engage in banter before addressing the fact that Sands wants to start a hunger strike and that 75 men are willing to join him. "Life must mean nothing to you," says the priest.
From that point of no return, we observe the physical deterioration and slow demise of Sands, who died after 66 days on hunger strike. Dialogue is minimal during this harrowing, deliberately disturbing sequence, throughout which Fassbender's performance is astonishing in its powerful expressiveness. The film plays on in the mind well after it's over, as we ponder what we have seen and the issues it raises.
Director McQueen and Enda Walsh, the Irish playwright who collaborated with him on the screenplay, have approached those issues with an evident concern for the human cost on both sides of the political divide. In the film's fascination with the use of the human body as the final weapon of protest, it takes on a strong contemporary relevance in the age of the suicide bomber.
