Hunger

Hunger (2008, Director: Steve McQueen): I’ve been finding it very hard to for­mu­late my thoughts on this film, but as I said to my wife as we walked out of the screening last night, I’d be very sur­prised if any­thing else I see at TIFF this year could be better. Director McQueen is a visual artist who is well known for his video install­a­tions, but this is his first fea­ture film. Hunger won the Camera d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and I expect it to win many more awards once it’s released theatrically.

The film por­trays the events sur­rounding a hunger strike that took place in 1981 in the Maze prison in Belfast, Northern Ireland. By the time the hunger strike had been called off after 7 months, 10 men had starved them­selves to death. The first to die was Bobby Sands, 27-year-old leader of the repub­lican pris­oners. Hunger begins by showing a few other peri­pheral char­ac­ters but about fif­teen minutes in settles on Sands (Michael Fassbender), an intense and defiant man who is leading the jailed mem­bers of Catholic para­mil­itary organ­iz­a­tions like the Provisional Irish Republican Army and the Irish National Liberation Army in a protest to gain sep­arate status as polit­ical pris­oners. The problem is that they’re facing a British gov­ern­ment led by Margaret Thatcher, a woman for whom com­promise was impossible. At the begin­ning of the film, con­di­tions in the prison are deplor­able, made even worse by the pris­oners’ prac­tice of dumping their urine into the hall­ways and smearing their cell walls with feces. They refuse to wear prison uni­forms and so are often naked, and they refuse to bathe or shave or have their hair cut. In these bar­baric con­di­tions, they look like animals and are treated like animals by the nakedly par­tisan (ie. Protestant and Unionist) prison system.

But far from using words for expos­i­tion, the first third of the film is remark­ably sparse in dia­logue, but intensely rich with images and, espe­cially, sounds. McQueen uses close up shots of a guard’s bloody knuckles, and we can guess how they were bloodied. We hear the ter­ri­fying beat of batons on the riot squad’s shields, and we know that viol­ence is in the air. Even in the silence, we can feel the ten­sion of some­thing threat­ening to erupt at any moment. When Sands is intro­duced, it’s in a brutal scene of guards drag­ging him from his cell to be for­cibly shaved and washed. He seems unable to just submit to this humi­li­ation and he’s beaten severely. The camera doesn’t spare us any details. We also see in close ups the way that the pris­oners smuggle com­mu­nic­a­tions in and out of the prison, using their bodies ingeni­ously to con­ceal mes­sages. But after this is dis­covered, there’s another hor­rific scene in which each pris­oner is sub­mitted to a painful and humi­li­ating body cavity search. It’s wrenching stuff, and when Sands decides to start the hunger strike cam­paign, it’s almost as if he’s decided that it’s the only form of con­trol he has left over his own body.

The middle sec­tion of the film is a tour de force of acting and dir­ect­orial restraint. In one static two-shot that extends more than twenty minutes, Sands and his priest (Liam Cunningham) argue over the mor­ality and efficacy of using a hunger strike to get what the pris­oners want. This sec­tion felt like watching a play, and the lack of facial close ups forces the audi­ence to find visual clues in mul­tiple places, in pos­ture and ges­ture and tone of voice. The inter­play between the two char­ac­ters is com­pel­ling and by the end, Sands’ determ­in­a­tion has grown.

The final third is almost com­pletely free of spoken dia­logue. Instead we watch as Sands’ body wastes away and his mind begins to inhabit a dif­ferent place. To watch this man do viol­ence to his own body in this way is almost even crueller than the earlier scenes, but he reaches a sort of purity of pur­pose that lives in his eyes, which are blazing until the very end.

Although this is a nar­rative film, and based on a real story, the way in which the story is told is almost com­pletely dif­ferent than most other nar­rative films. Imagery and sound design are as equally important as dia­logue and char­acter devel­op­ment. This was com­pletely absorbing and one of the most intense exper­i­ences I’ve ever had in a movie theatre. Maybe that’s why I find myself so inar­tic­u­lately fum­bling to try to describe it.

P.S. In a scene that almost derailed the whole exper­i­ence, a group of about ten women sat in the front rows and were vis­ited before the screening by actor Michael Fassbender, who pro­ceeded to sign auto­graphs and have his photo taken with each of them as they clucked and screamed and giggled incess­antly. My wife and I couldn’t figure out what was going on until at some point in the post-screening Q&A it was men­tioned that he had also starred in 300. The irony was thick. From a slick block­buster accused by many of being a thinly-veiled fas­cist pro­pa­ganda piece pre­paring Americans for a war with Iran to a deeply per­sonal film that explored the value of a single life. The women were undoubtedly impressed by Fassbender’s “ripped” body in the block­buster, and I wonder how they reacted to seeing his “torn” body in Hunger.

Trailer

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Steve McQueen and actor Michael Fassbender from after the screening:

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Duration: 15:37

(10/10)

Tagged as: #tiff08, history, northernireland, politics, uk