Hunger: 96 minutes. Rated: MA. Director: Steve McQueen. Starring: Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham
An assessment of Hunger, Steve McQueen's film about Irish republican prisoners of the British government, is illuminated by consideration of another artist, Australian expat singer songwriter Nick Cave.
In life and art Cave has been drawn to the potent, sticky territory where the sacred meets the profane. His essay An introduction to the Gospel of Mark includes a startling recollection that, as a young man with a 'burgeoning interest in violent literature, coupled with an unnamed sense of the divinity in things', Cave was led to the Old Testament, which 'spoke to that part of me that railed and hissed and spat at the world'.
Later he discovered the New Testament, via Mark's 'breathless' gospel, which he describes as:
... a clatter of bones, so raw, nervy and lean on information that the narrative aches with the melancholy of absence. Scenes of deep tragedy are treated with such a matter of factness and raw economy they become almost palpable in their unprotected sorrowfulness.
The dichotomy of the sacred and the profane, evoked so vividly by Cave, is useful for reflecting upon Hunger. At times this is a harrowing, downright disturbing film. Yet it is also beautiful, even magnetic, not just in its imagery (first-time filmmaker McQueen is a visual artist), but also in its positing of something in humanity that transcends cruel, physical reality.
While Cave has a love of narrative, Hunger is a work of image and theme with only the barest of stories to frame it. It is an account of the final days of IRA activist Bobby Sands (Fassbender), during the notorious 'blanket' and 'no wash' protests of 1981, and the subsequent 'hunger' protest during which Sands lost his life.
The republican prisoners were attempting to obtain political status from an unsympathetic Thatcher government. Thus the 'blanket' and 'no wash' protests were characterised by a refusal to wear the uniform of criminals, or to bathe or shave, and the prisoners wore only coarse blankets for modesty and warmth.
Cinematically, one result of this is that the characters remain virtually faceless, concealed behind masks of beard and grime, and undistinguishable in their near-nakedness. They are symbols in McQueen's portrait of violently held ideologies and desperately pursued political ends.
And yet they are recognisably human, their physical vulnerability literally exposed. The brutality they suffer at the hands of