Hunger

If you're looking for a laugh-a-minute or a feel-good film, you'll probably want to give 'Hunger' a wide berth. This is the story of the final few weeks of the life of Bobby Sands, the IRA convict who starved himself to death at the height of the Northern Ireland conflict in the 1980s as a protest against the lack of political prisoner status that was awarded to him and the rest of the IRA. Not exactly the kind of subject matter that lends itself to light-hearted storytelling.

The story of Bobby Sands and the hunger strikers is fairly well-known. Rather than concentrating on the history, the film tells the story from the point of view of a number of minor underlings in this battle between the British State and the IRA. The film opens with and is initially told through the eyes of a prison guard. We then follow several months in the life of one of the many IRA prisoners living in utter squalor in his isolated cell before Bobby Sands is introduced with only about half of the film to go.

This is an extremely slow film which spends a lot of time lingering on shots which help to build a feeling for what the atmosphere in Ulster during the conflict must have been like. These are people who are fighting a battle which has been going on for hundreds of years, the long shots of a guard mopping up piss or a man smoking generate a feeling of tiredness yet at the same time demanding a determination to continue watching. Perhaps something like what people in Ulster felt during that troubled time; having been fighting a battle for hundreds of years people must have been so tired of it, yet the divisions ran so deep that simply not fighting any more was never an option.

In a film that is so full of atmosphere building camera work, it is interesting that one central scene steals the show. A scene, shot in a single take, has Sands talking about his motivations to hunger strike with his family priest. This is the most political part in the film, in which the motivations for the Republican movement and British government are hinted at but never signposted.

For a film which is about such a politically divisive subject, and one which is so fresh in the minds of everyone in Britain, it manages to be fantastically even-handed in the presentation of history. Every time I thought that the film-makers were going to become sympathetic towards Sands and the IRA, the true horror of their paramilitary war was shown. At the end I did think that Sands' sacrifice is seen as a vindication of the man, although I don't think this vindication reflects back on to the IRA.