'Hunger': Film recounts IRA prisoners' hunger strike amid beatings, torture
“H arrowing” doesn’t even begin to describe the brutal power of “Hunger,” the first film by British artist Steve McQueen.
It’s documentary-level real, from the Belfast accents to the furtive visiting-room exchanges of tiny, densely written messages, called “comms.” And yet McQueen’s artistic spirit imbues every scene, making the impact more powerful.
HUNGER
Three and a half stars
STARRING: Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham, Stuart Graham, Brian Milligan and Liam McMahon
DIRECTOR: Steve McQueen
RUNNING TIME: 96 minutes
RATING: Not rated, but equivalent to an R for prolonged and serious violence, nudity and some language.
THE LOWDOWN:A harrowingly realistic look at the events leading up to the 1981 hunger strike death of Bobby Sands in the Maze Prison outside Belfast.
j“Hunger” begins in 1981, when IRA prisoners in the Hblocks of the Maze prison are staging a protest to win political status. After a spiral of beatings and further protests, the men have refused to wear prison clothing, covering themselves with rough blankets, and will no longer “slop out” the buckets containing their excrement, instead smearing their feces on the walls and pouring urine into the corridors from their cells.
So it’s a bit jarring that the movie begins with the bright images of a man washing and shaving, then eating breakfast. It isn’t until the man, Raymond Lohan, played by Stuart Graham, gets down to look under his car for a bomb before starting it that we realize he is a prison guard at the Maze. His comfortable-looking life is far from it. It’s our first hint that life in this time and place has many layers.
The plummy, unmistakable tones of Margaret Thatcher’s intransigent rhetoric punctuate the narrative.
A new prisoner, Davey Gillen, played by Brian Milligan, is brought into the H-blocks, handed a blanket and ushered to his cell, where he finds an appalling scene: another young man, thin and bearded, long-haired and haunted, in a room whose walls are decorated with reeking abstract art in every shade of brown.
Worse — much worse — is to come. The prisoners are dragged from their cells, battered, their hair and beards roughly chopped, thrown into tubs, scrubbed with stiff brooms and finally dragged from the now-bloody baths. The cells are pressure-washed, and the cycle begins again.
Just when we think we can’t bear another minute of the dark, claustrophobic torture, nearly wordless except for screams, the scene changes. Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and sympathetic parish priest Father Dominic Moran, played by Liam Cunningham, sit down to discuss the prisoners’ next move. The two face each other across a small table, almost motionless. The lengthy dialogue is riveting as the two joust over morality, tactics and outcomes. Sin and success are weighed as Moran gradually realizes Sands is poised to martyr himself.
The scene shifts again, and we see Sands well into the hunger strike that would claim his life after 66 excruciating days. The hospital wards seem heavenly, bathed in light. The orderlies gently dab salve on bedsores. Even one beefy man whose knuckle tattoos betray a Loyalist paramilitary background cradles Sands like a child after his wasted body collapses.
Throughout “Hunger,” the camera lingers on the agony of the prisoners, but nobody is really innocent in this fraught and tortured world. In one of the film’s most shocking moments, the violence in the H-blocks reaches outside the walls to claim a victim. Predictably, this horrifying attack solves nothing.
Behind the scenes, the world’s revulsion at hunger strikes did prompt negotiations, although 10 hunger strikers died, Bobby Sands first. Thatcher’s government never backed down from its public position, although the prisoners’ demands were granted gradually and without fanfare. A 1997 IRA cease-fire was followed by the Good Friday agreement and the withdrawal of most British troops from Ireland.
Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork, who himself died after 74 days on hunger strike in 1920, said, “It is not those who can inflict the most but those that can suffer the most who will prevail.” In “Hunger,” we get a wrackingly close look at this era’s endurance and sacrifice, just as it happened.•
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