Hunger

Given the filmmakers’ credentials - one is a former winner of the Turner Prize - it is perhaps not surprising that the aesthetic appeal of this film is so strong. Not to suggest plagiarism on the part of the filmmakers, but it is at times almost as if the visual identity of some renowned artists (Lucian Freud, or Francis Bacon, for example) have been channelled into the framing of successive scenes. Of course, these are just two particularly obvious references among many possible, and is not meant to detract from the filmmakers’ eye for a striking image, demonstrated everywhere from the inert body position of murder victim, to a snow flake melting on a bloody knuckle.

The film is comprised of three beautifully photographed segments. An expertly composed opening act full of intrigue provides a gripping introduction to the figure and circumstances of Bobby Sands, an iconic figure in Northern Ireland’s euphemistically termed “Troubles”, who is a prisoner of the state in Belfast in the early 1980s. An extended dialogue between two characters then takes place. This is followed by a depiction of Sands’ involvement in the tragic 1981 “hunger strike” by prisoners in Northern Ireland who had paramilitary links and wanted political status. Practically all of the script’s dialogue is contained in the middle expository scene. While the minimal use of dialogue does not detract from the other acts, it is, initially at least, a welcome feature of the middle act. Here, the unhesitating fluency and poise of the characters as they bat quips back and forth is clearly unrealistic, but the subject of their discussion, the planned hunger strike and it’s ethical weight, is well analysed. The simplicity of this scene, the two actors sitting and talking across a table, resembles something from a stage production, and the actors’ handling of the lengthy single-shot set-up is highly commendable. If it is the case that during their discussion the actors’ accents sometimes slip, the audience, dry-mouthed simply at the sight of the two men gulping and exhaling vast clouds of cigarette smoke, are somewhat sympathetic.

During the dialogue, Sands delivers a long justification of his planned actions to his co-locutor, in the process recounting a defining event from his childhood which is revisited at a later point and thus assumes a deep significance for the filmmakers’ presentation of Sands’ story. A difficulty here is that the filmmakers note that some characters and events depicted are fictitious. The wince-inducing viscerality of the piece and it’s consummate presentation notwithstanding, our reaction to the film must take on a different hue in the light of this statement. In search of the facts, what is reliable for our analysis, we are left with an extraordinary physical effort by the actors, most notably Fassbender, playing Sands, the skill of the filmmakers, the voice of then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her resolute indifference to the hunger strikers, and the violent lives and deaths of those, on both sides of the struggle, who suffered through “the Troubles”.

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