Review: Hunger (5/5)

Hunger
(Steve McQueen):
Michael Fassbender, Brian Milligan, Liam McMahon, Liam Cunningham, Stuart Graham.
Running time: 92 mins (15A)


I can only imagine the frustrated banging of fists of all those lining up to proclaim on Hunger. Here is one of the most supercharged political issues of our time ? the 1981 Maze prison hunger strikes ? and it hits the screen certainly supercharged, but without a hint of politicking. It marks the debut of artist-turned-director Steve McQueen, a Londoner who was a young teenager during Bobby Sands' hunger strike. He takes to the story with fearless abandon, shooting it entirely on his terms. It's a remarkable film ? a work of stunning originality and dazzling cinematic expression. Its sheer visceral thump left me hobbling into the light broken, beaten and scarred. With just one film, McQueen has shown he is a major cinematic artist.
Hunger stars Irish actor Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands, but you'll have to wait a while to see him. First we meet Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham), prison guard and Maze brutaliser. We watch him bathe a hand with bloody knuckles. Before work, he lowers himself under his car to check for a booby trap. Then he puts the key into the ignition. Your muscles explode with tension. Nothing happens. It just isn't that kind of film. Instead, it erupts with mesmerising detail: crumbs fall like boulders into a napkin; or the hazy, beautiful sequence outside in falling snow where Raymond smokes a cigarette and a single snowdrop melts on a bloody knuckle. McQueen paints a picture of a man about to stress-fracture. He hoovers microscopic details with an insatiable hunger for feeling.
The H-Blocks are a circle of hell. The prisoners, in dirty protest, have taken to interior design using their own excrement. Maggots squirm in piles of dumped food. The prisoners tip buckets of urine under their cell doors, stinking tributaries that trickle into a bay of piss in the corridor. There is a long shot of the man who has to clean it up. And that's one of the things about Hunger: it wants to capture everything ? from the prisoners' conditions to the man whose job it is to mop their mess; or the work involved in hosing their excrement from the walls.
The film surges from tenderness to brutality: new prisoner Davey (Brian Milligan) nurses a fly atop his finger; there's an eyeball, wrought with horror, of a young riot squad officer whose job, in battle gear, is to pummel the prisoners. The men are forced naked under a gauntlet of truncheons, their backs mushrooming into welts. The policeman escapes to sob behind a wall.
The prisoners only get to meet at mass. It is one of the few amusing scenes: a priest declaiming to a room of non-listeners, busy whispering into each other's ears. You can imagine Mel Gibson getting giddy at the sight: all those bruised, battered, long-haired bearded men. It looks like a Jesus Christ convention. But Hunger doesn't saddle the viewer with the kind of Christ-like noble suffering that Gibson dumped on us in The Passion of the Christ. Sands is beaten and shorn like a wild animal. He flails pathetically before going limp in the bath. He is no Christ figure.
But his inner spirit is wild cat. In an exhilarating verbal set-piece, he faces a priest (Liam Cunningham) who has come to talk him out of going on hunger strike. He accuses Sands of being a fool, of wanting to be a martyr. It's like watching tennis, your eyes work back and forth across the heads, a net of blue cigarette smoke curling between them. The spitfire dialogue volleys like trench gunfire. Even the camera sits down in awe. (It's the only time where you feel the presence of co-screenwriter Enda Walsh.) Cunningham's priest is brutal and honest; Sands has a cool but fierce passion. The exchange ends when the camera roams into Cunningham's eye to reveal dismay and defeat.
Fassbender comes into his own in the riveting final act. His body crumples; his skin blisters into sores; ribs poke the air around him. Food is laid beside the bed: scrambled eggs, jam on toast, an apple. Hungry-boy food that Sands, slipping into hallucination, ignores. Dying in the movies never looked so ghastly, so awkward, so disgusting. And McQueen attacks it with corporeal fascination. Fassbender conjures a hollowed body clinging desperately to life, yet he stares out with a thick-headed contradictory defiance. I think it's quite remarkable how he does that.
Hunger won the Camera D'Or at Cannes, and is on the level of another cinematic high-water mark of this year ? The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. It is no coincidence that both that film's director, Julian Schnabel, and McQueen day-jobbed before as artists. It has liberated attitudes to making movies. McQueen approaches cinematic form like he never read the rule book, taking narrative grammar and beating it with a truncheon.
The film is ravenous for experience. McQueen wants to know what it feels like when the mind and the body are pushed to the limit. Sands emerges here as neither a martyr nor a terrorist but a human being. The men who mistreat him are brutalised in a different way. You feel for all of them. It defuses bias, sweeps aside politics, until you see the mess for what it is. And that is quite an achievement.