Hunger, Steve McQueen
"My film is about the prisoners and their purely human situation. It has no message. I don't want to indoctrinate people, but I want to raise a discussion.” So says Steve McQueen, visual artist, Turner-Prize winner and director of controversial movie Hunger, when I met him and his cast on the red carpet at the film’s UK premiere on Sunday at the London Film Festival.
Belfast, 1981: Raymond (Stuart Graham) is a tormented prison officer who can't shrug off the horror of his job: as a daily routine, he punches prisoners and then dips his broken knuckles in water to feel the pain. Davey (Brian Milligan) is a young IRA member who tries to survive with dignity in the infamous HMP Maze, despite joining the equally infamous "no wash" protest. In a nearby cell, IRA prisoner Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) talks to a priest (Liam Cunningham), starves to death and becomes a martyr. Margaret Thatcher's voice hovers in the air. It says that the British Government will always deny political status to the crimes committed during the "Troubles" in Ireland.
This is a truly shocking debut from McQueen, but isn’t just another film – already winner of the Cannes Camera D’Or for Best Debut - about Bobby Sands. On the contrary, it examines the idea of protest from a metaphysical perspective, a reflection on the effects of physical violence even on the brightest minds, with the political side downplayed.
That said, the cast admitted to me that the Belfast premiere had been a tough test.
"I was concerned about possible protests," recalls Cunningham "but the film only shows the humanity and desperateness of the situation.”
Stuart Graham explains, "People protested when they hadn't seen the film yet. After the screening everything was great. When we started shooting, both Liam and I agreed from the start that we were part of something special, with very complex characters.”
McQueen has put all his artistic experience into creating a cinematic language that is raw and unpleasant, that does not flinch when it comes to showing acts of sadistic violence or disturbing anatomical details. Indeed, it documents every effect of starvation with clinical precision, yet manages to eschew the dreaded "pornography of pain" and maintains a basic respect for the human beings who are suffering on screen.
Michael Fassbender starved himself for 10 weeks for the final sequences of the film.
"My role was very challenging physically and psychologically. I had to suffer and lose weight - but I'm still here.” he says.
Unlike Bobby Sands, who died 66 days into his hunger strike.
The film is divided into three main chapters: Davey and his life in Maze, a dialogue between Sands and a priest who tries to dissuade him from the hunger strike, and Sands' exhausting process of voluntary starvation. McQueen's poetics work on a constant juxtaposition of opposite elements: the camera alternates images of tearing beauty and of repulsion, the fast-paced editing of the first chapter gives way to a 17 minute long take in the second one, the inhuman silence of the jail sequences gives way to the longest continuous dialogue in the history of cinema.
