May 16, 2008 Friday
Superb acting enriches powerful story of Bobby Sands
BYLINE: DEREK MALCOLM
SECTION: A; Pg. 3
LENGTH: 355 words
REVIEW Hunger **** Cannes Film Festival
THERE may be no British films being judged in the competition at Cannes
this year, but there were many saying Steve McQueen's Hunger, his film
about the IRA "martyr" Bobby Sands, which was premiered last night,
should have been included. Simply on the level of good film-making,
quite apart from its controversial subject matter, it surely deserved
that status.
It is a powerful and dramatic but not overly hagiographic or
sensational account of the first man to starve himself to death in an
attempt to persuade the British government to give the Maze prisoners
political rather than criminal status. Filmed with considerable finesse
throughout, it teaches us not that Sands was either a mistaken fanatic
in a hopeless cause or a revolutionary hero, something like the Che
Guevara of the IRA, but that when irreconcilables clash in situations
much like war, terrible things can happen. We know that from Iraq and
other recent conflicts. But McQueen's film rubs our noses in the fact
that nothing has changed, and it was ever thus.
It is certainly a hard watch as the Maze prisoners in H-Block join the
blanket protest, sharing filthy cells whose walls are strewn with
excrement, getting beaten up by guards after destroying the civilian
clothes and clean cells they are eventually given and, led by Sands
(Michael Fassbender), resisting any attempt to compromise with the
Thatcher government of the early Eighties.
