The winner of the Golden Camera (for best first film) at the 2008
Cannes Film Festival, McQueen’s film tells the true story of Bobby
Sands, an IRA activist held in Belfast’s Maze prison (circa 1981) who
died after a 66-day hunger strike in protest of his lack of status as a
political prisoner. Nine other prisoners followed Sands to their demise
before the British government made concessions that did not include the
political recognition Sands and his fellow strikers were seeking.
McQueen’s visual-arts background results in a debut of startling
confidence and control — beautifully framed shots, a provocative
use of sound and silence, purposeful rhyming imagery, absorbing long
shots, and an inventive structure.
Though the film is ostensibly about Sands and his hunger strike,
Sands (in a charismatic performance from Michael Fassbender) doesn’t
appear until a third of the way into the film, and his hunger strike
isn’t depicted until the final 20 minutes. McQueen first sets up the
film’s landscape with a series of linked protagonists leading to
Sands.
First is Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham, a knockout, nearly wordless
performance), a Maze guard first seen eating breakfast at his home
before checking the undercarriage of his car for a bomb. Next is Davey
Gillen (Brian Milligan), a frightened new prisoner.
Through these two initial characters, McQueen depicts the normal
life of the prison, where everyone fits into social roles that
dehumanize both guard and prisoner. The inmates at Maze, who go naked
after refusing to where prison garb, are resourceful, using what little
they have at their disposal (feces, urine, food, insects, and their own
bodies) to pursue their needs (creativity, dissent, communication,
companionship).
Taut, pale, covered in facial hair, they might be cavemen, adorning
their stone walls in shit tableaux, at least until a “no-wash strike”
is ended by brutally mandated haircuts and baths, their cells
pressure-washed. McQueen juxtaposes the raging, roiling, bloody bathtub
waters where Sands — introduced here — has been
forcibly washed against the calm but also bloodied sink water when
Lohan soaks his bruised knuckles.
Following one particularly noisy protest, the inmates are subjected
to a body-cavity search backed up by beatings from imported riot
police, one of whom McQueen captures shrinking from his duty
— recoiling, weeping.
Hunger‘s depiction of suffering and degradation is
unflinchingly direct and can be hard to take, but never feels
gratuitous. The film manages to be at once gritty and ascetic, the
noisy violence and squalor of the early prison scenes and the quiet
agony of the later hunger-strike scenes broken up by a bravura
24-minute dialogue (including one nearly 17-minute unbroken shot) in
which Sands meets with his acerbic priest (Liam Cunningham) to announce
his decision — an argument for martyrdom the film witnesses
more than endorses. For a film in which dialogue (not sound, speech) is
otherwise irrelevant, this oasis of talk contextualizes what happens
before and after.
Hunger screens — only once — at the
Brooks Museum of Art as part of an ongoing and very fruitful
partnership between the Brooks and Indie Memphis.
Hunger
Brooks Museum of Art, Thursday, June 4th, 7:30 p.m., $7 or $5 for
Indie Memphis or Brooks members
