Coruscating, original and perversely thrilling, Steve McQueen’s Hunger arrives with a truck load of awards (from Cannes, Toronto, Sydney) and a seemingly impossible task. We’ve all heard songs and legends about the mountain people who, leaving the house for the first time since the War of Independence, went to queue around the block for Michael Collins. This nation is fond of turning out en masse for historical Irish drama; In the Name of the Father and The Wind that Shakes the Barley, we are told, brought in punters who have rarely darkened the door of a cinema before or since.
Films relating to a certain conflict in a particular northerly province, however, tend to fare significantly less well at the Irish box office. Perhaps the events touched on in Bloody Sunday and Silent Grace are too raw and recent for indigenous audiences. Perhaps Omagh is simply too awful to contemplate for two hours in a darkened cinema.
Steve McQueen’s Hunger looks set to be the title that rewrites this rule and many others. An unflinching depiction of the last days of Bobby Sands, this is not merely a record of the 1981 hunger strikes: this is an event movie at the level of synapse and nerve end. It is, quite simply, like nothing we’ve seen or experienced before.
It helps, of course, that Mr. McQueen, a London-born filmmaker of Afro-Caribbean descent, has no axe to grind when it comes to Northern Irish politics. But even if he were partisan in the matter, it would be impossible to tell given his unique treatment of the material. A Turner Prize winning artist, McQueen finds enough drama in the details to avoid political rhetoric or posturing. Who needs lengthy exposition about the ‘Troubles’ when a painful close-up of a prison guard washing knuckles that never quite heal will suffice?
This economical use of cinematic grammar continues throughout the largely silent film, as McQueen recreates day-to-day sensations. How do you learn to suppress your gag reflex when there’s shit on the walls? How can you masturbate beside rotting food and maggots? How do you clean up twelve piss pots all dumped out at once? This primarily sensorial account slowly coagulates into a riveting, trembling physical sensation.
The director’s other great innovation is to rip up the rulebook on the mechanics of movie heroism. In Hunger, the chicanery that is normally put in service of establishing our identification with a protagonist is redistributed between all characters equally. Once again, it’s all in the details; the small expression of relief as the prison guard’s wife (Laine Megaw) watches him successfully start the car; the troubled look on his face as he (Stuart Graham, a towering performance) takes a cigarette break; the young officer who breaks down while beating a naked prisoner. McQueen’s H-Block facility, it is made quite clear, is a jail for all.
We hear Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) speak only once in an explosive twenty-minute exchange with a visiting priest (Liam Cunningham). This sometimes terse, sometimes fond exchange, co-written by the director and Irish playwright Enda Walsh, covers all the arguments for and against the hunger strike. It is a phenomenal duelling performance between Messrs. Cunningham and Fassbender, one that reanimates the lively, dark humorist who authored the Bobby Sands’ diaries.
Bobby Sands’ subsequent starvation and death, presented here in stark, corporeal terms, outlines Hunger’s primary purpose. This is a film about the body, that vast depository of unpleasant fluids, and its potential as a political weapon. There are no revolutionaries or terrorists here, only human beings in all their terrible, beautiful frailty.
We’d be very surprised to see a better film this year.