Hunger - Film Only (Hunger (DVD))

Member Name: DavidJay

Product:	Hunger (DVD)
Date:	18/03/09 (30 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Incredible cinematography, peerless direction, powerful

Disadvantages: None.

A gruelling, hypnotic, uncompromising account of the 1981 IRA hunger strikes - or at least, of the chunk of such directly related to the death of republican prisoner Bobby Sands (played by Michael Fassbender) - Hunger, the debut feature by Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen, is an absolutely flawless, peerless piece of work - the second best film of 2008, for my money (nestled between Wall-E and There Will Be Blood, as it happens - two films with which, surprisingly enough, it shares quite a bit in common, insofar as tone and form are concerned).

Regardless of what one might feel about Sands as an individual, or, more importantly, as an Icon, McQueen's incredible, meditative study of his final days is almost impossibly wrenching - and horrifically beautiful.

Divided fairly neatly into three distinct acts, Hunger runs something like this - A handful of prisoners and guards flitter about the Maze Prison during the dirty / no-wash protest that pre-empted the hunger strike.

Bobby Sands has an 18 minute, static-camera, no-cuts debate with a priest (Liam Cunningham), in which he lays out the IRA's decision re: the hunger strike, outlines his motives and discusses the idea of, and the ethics of, political martyrdom, or suicide.

Bobby Sands starves to death.

Of these acts, the first and third are, for the most partly, largely dialogue free. We join characters mid-joke, we hear the odd mumble and response, we catch snippets of radio banter relating to the protest, but McQueen is much more interested in the saying than the said, in the eyes, in the tremble of a finger.

It's slowly paced, but absolutely riveting, mostly on account of McQueen's exceptional eye for beauty amidst the rankest horror - the much-discussed circles of shit on the prison walls, the streams of piss trickling along the corridors - all captured in long, patient takes as weighty as any of the issues under discussion.

Beautiful, yes - but brutal. Seriously, harrowingly brutal. There are sequences in this film that play in the dark back the eyes here still, shot for shot, pan for pan. The "haircut" - it was a third viewing before I realised that the recipient of such was Bobby Sands, so pummelling was the experience - the riot officer crying as his peers set upon the prisoners, the nursing home...

And those final twenty, twenty-five minutes, when the film swoops into Sands' body, dragging our own bodies with it...

Each time I've seen it, my reaction has been different. Once, the lights came up and my first reaction was nervous laughter. Another time, I sat silent for fifteen minutes, a cigarette long-burned-out and clutched still in my hand. Always, it's been shock and awe.

Hunger...

The best British film of the decade. There you go.

Summary: Regardless of the politics of the protagonists, this a masterpiece.