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Flicks - Hunger Hunger, a film about the 1981 hunger strike led by IRA leader Bobby Sands in Belfast’s Maze Prison, is a thoroughly devastating work of cinematic art. by Chris Dashiell - The Film Snob Art seeks to illuminate every aspect, every corner of human experience, and it takes a certain kind of courage and ambition in an artist to write, say, The Inferno. In modern terms, that means portraying the darkest hell on earth that people inflict on themselves and each other. That, too, needs to be understood and transformed.
A young British filmmaker named Steve McQueen (no relation to the late American actor) has turned his gaze on the 1981 hunger strike led by IRA leader Bobby Sands in Belfast's Maze Prison. The result is a film called Hunger, and it's a thoroughly devastating work of cinematic art.
The movie opens with a man soaking his bloody knuckles in a bathroom sink, and then, after checking under his car for explosives, leaving for work. He's a guard at the prison, and it's a tribute to McQueen's rigorous method that the guards in the film are not demonized. In fact, actions in Hunger seem to take on a political life greater than the personalities of the various people performing them—McQueen wants to show how institutions create their own inevitable results that are independent of what we may feel about them.
Outside of a few news excerpts and bits of speeches by Margaret Thatcher, we're not supplied with a lot of background, only that the IRA inmates have been denied status as political prisoners and instead are classified as common criminals. In protest, they refuse to wear the prison uniforms, wrapping themselves only in dirty blankets, and they also refuse to wash, defecating in their cells and then decorating the walls with their feces. Urine periodically flows from under the cell doors into the hallways as well. In retaliation, the guards drag the prisoners to be washed in a tub, savagely beating them in the process.
A good deal of time passes before we see Bobby Sands himself, played by the excellent Michael Fassbender. Much of the film goes almost without dialogue, McQueen simply establishing the atmosphere of rage, affliction, and powerlessness with his austere visual strategies, evoking the experience of prisoners and guards in their harrowing, rat-like confinement. Right in the middle of the film McQueen has a long scene, a tour de force involving a conversation between Sands and a priest, Father Moran, played by Liam Cunningham. Moran is sympathetic to the IRA cause, and the conversation begins with black humor and shared sarcasm, but then Sands lets him know of the planned hunger strike. The priest thinks it's a crazy idea. Their debate becomes the film's defining moment, which ends with the telling of a haunting childhood memory by Sands. The rest of the film shows us the slow tragic wasting away of the self-martyred revolutionary, and McQueen's style becomes darkly lyrical until the end.
It doesn't seem adequate to say that Hunger is a stunning achievement. As brutal and uncompromising as it is in its vision of inhumanity, it also allows a glimpse of what is possible.