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Date Posted: 11:35:47 11/09/08 Sun GMT
Author: Lynn
Subject: Hunger review: Unwashed Bobby Sands starves himself to death (Bloomberg News) h


Unwashed Bobby Sands Starves Himself to Death in Movie `Hunger'

Review by Farah Nayeri


Oct. 31 (Bloomberg) -- ``I want to show what it was like to see, hear, smell and touch in the H-block in 1981.''

Director Steve McQueen's ``Hunger'' takes moviegoers inside a prison near Belfast, Northern Ireland, where republican inmates refused to wear uniforms and dirtied their cells in protest. ``Hunger,'' which opens today in the U.K., clinched the 2008 Cannes Film Festival's Camera d'Or prize for first feature. (A visual artist, McQueen also won the U.K.'s 1999 Turner Prize.)

The long-haired, bearded inmates live in shared cells, wear nothing but brown blankets, smear the walls with their excrement, and create mounds of leftover food that maggots crawl over.

The movie opens on Raymond Lohan, a middle-aged jail officer. The director initially conceals his line of work to present the character's human face and chart his grim existence. Lohan heaves with pain as he immerses his bruised knuckles in a water-filled sink. Leaving for work, he checks the car's underbelly for explosives, while his wife watches anxiously.

The focus then shifts to Davey Gillen, a young republican sentenced to six years, who strips on arrival. ``I will not wear the uniform of a criminal,'' he declares grandly, wiggling out of his briefs. ``I demand to wear my own clothes.''

Old Masters

Most scenes have little dialogue and no music: They're raw, drawn-out close-ups that recall video art, or Old Master paintings. (McQueen cites Velazquez and Goya in the notes.)

When the character of Bobby Sands is introduced, he is dragged, kicking and screaming, to officer Lohan, who violently cuts off his hair and beard.

Sands -- a Provisional Irish Republican Army member jailed for gun possession, who was elected to the U.K. Parliament while on hunger strike -- turns into the movie's central hero. Try as McQueen does to show the other side, Sands takes on the aura of a martyr with Christ-like physical attributes. When he and his followers are clubbed for trashing their cells, they look, in their bloodied loincloths, like figures from a crucifixion scene.

The only substantial chunk of dialogue comes in a scene between Sands and Father Dominic Moran, which seems to have been filmed in a single take. With a table and ashtray between them, the men start with small talk, and end with Sands's announcement that he is going on hunger strike.

Voice of Reason

The priest tries to bring Sands to his senses -- and acts as the movie's voice of reason. He begs Sands to think of his child, warns that the U.K. government will never give in, and stresses the pointlessness of dying for the cause.

Michael Fassbender, the actor playing Sands, delivers an award-worthy performance. The sight of his emaciated body sprawled on a bed is one of the film's most memorable visions.

McQueen's talents reach far and wide. At London's Barbican Centre last summer, he showed ``Queen and Country,'' a cabinet of fake stamps, each portraying one of Britain's Iraq war dead. McQueen is campaigning for the Royal Mail to issue the stamps.

Admittedly, McQueen's treatment of Sands in ``Hunger'' is not evenhanded. Yet he has created a genre of his own, a cross between video art and filmmaking that works.

``Hunger'' opens today in the U.K., and on Dec. 5 in the U.S. Rating: ***.

(Farah Nayeri writes for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

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