Cast: Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham

Director: Steve McQueen

Screenplay: Enda Walsh, Steve McQueen

Running time: 1 hr 36 mins

Genre: British Film/Drama



CRITIQUE:

For a film that has snatched the Camera D’Or at Cannes Film Festival and twenty other European awards this year, and to highlight its remarkable top billing at Sight & Sound’s ten best films of 2008 list, clearly there is something extraordinary going on here. Time will tell if Hunger will penetrate the Oscar plot. For the entirety of its making, Hunger is a rock-solid blow that will leave cinephiles breathless, mainstream audience dumbfounded and visual artists ignited. This is a cinematic achievement in its own right; unflinchingly brutal and disarmingly human – a rare event for the British contemporary cinema that is visually stylised yet at the same time hauntingly real. At this crossroad, where British cinema is swarmed with socialist dramas, here lies a passage of transformation that a contemporary piece such as this can be elevated as a work of art.


Gallery-artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen takes his camera from making video arts to this authoritative debut feature that most amateurs would run away from. He tackles a bleak, dark material of the IRA episode in Northern Ireland, particularly the harrowing state of affairs in Maze prison where “political prisoners” are held captive. Despite of the complex politics of the 80s, we are barely shown the outside world, the noise barrage of pot lids at the prologue of the film and the Margaret Thatcher’s sonorous speeches echo in a few scenes, rebuffing republican liberty – the real focus of this film is from within. And here the details are excruciatingly disturbing: the excrement-smeared prison walls, the urine-washed cell corridors, and the shocking corpse-like bodies of its inmates. It’s all explicit, yet at the same time, implicit. In its use of imagery gives room for visual poetry, with psychological and philosophical resonance. The use of shit daubed on walls represents the even shittier situations outside it. A police’s quiet meditation outside, as the snow falls in his callous hands, facing responsibility and extinction. An inmate’s encounter with a fly in a hole of his cell bars implies a minute contact of the outside. A new police recruit breaks down to tears, hiding on a wall, where a riot of torture is happening on the other side.


In the first few scenes, we are reminded that silence has the power words cannot express fully. The narrative structure shifts from a police warden, a wordless look into his daily routine, then to a new inmate as he discovers the ruthless, grim reality within the walls, and finally to the film’s axis, where the moral issues rotate, the character of Bobby Sands and his ordeal to initiate hunger strike, his final defiance. Then it gives a dramatic flood of words at the middle-half of the film, a notable aspect in which it manages to say a lot about serious issues of politics, religion, humanity, life and death by showing very little. Stunningly exemplified in a static camera shot, 24-minute talk-a-thon, showing a dialogue interplay between Michael Fassbender’s Bobby Sands and the priest he calls forth to spread the message out to the crumbling world, debating the ethos and morality of his defiance, the hunger strike.


In his belief that “freedom is everything”, when taken away, they turned into themselves and use their most basic bodily function as their way of protest, the basic human need for survival by resisting food, clothing and sanitation. It’s suffering for a cause, an ill-received protest which caused the lives of its protesters. These philosophies creep behind the scenes and come into full magnitude when McQueen takes off the camera to shock audience in its documentary-approach torture scenes. The result is startling.


The final third of the film steps into the province of the personal, from the heavy politics of the first to the philosophies of the second. The death of Bobby Sands, to which Fassbender staggeringly drops body weight and shows a squeezed ribcage (rivals that of Christian Bale’s in The Machinist), is dealt with sidestepping over-sentimentality. Instead, it transcends into poetic justice, Sands recalling his boyhood cross-country running and the symbolic bird flying, the power of anguish and final step to freedom is compacted into beautiful silence.


VERDICT:

The year’s most harrowing, most startling, most visually astounding experience. It also manages to be poetic and philosophical despite of its minimalism. A true work of art; consolidated by McQueen’s passionate direction and Fassbender’s stalwart performance that needs a cry for an Oscar.



RATING: A+