Somewhere

Pop culture detritus.

Shame (2012)

Steve McQueen’s last film, Hunger, about IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, was a rigorously controlled, unjudgemental piece of filmmaking; technically virtuosic and riveting, but somewhat impenetrable emotionally.  It served to announce the arrival not only of a singular new voice in British cinema, but also proved the crossover vehicle for Michael Fassbender, with whom McQueen again teams up with for his sophomore effort.  Here, Fassbender plays Brandon, a fashionable and affluent thirty-something New Yorker for whom sex and pornography form a bedrock of sorts to a life that is on much shakier ground internally.  We see him engaged in sex with prostitutes, barflies and, once, with a man.  His outwardly stylish, cool demeanour hides something at once predatory and needy underneath, as demonstrated in a nervy opening sequence that has Brandon engage in a silent flirtation with a married woman on the subway.  The arrival of his equally troubled sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), would serve a different purpose in a lesser film, but here she needles and provokes Brandon in a way that is believably fraternal even as it is tainted by her own skewed perspective on sexuality.

Whilst Shame remains a more accessible film than Hunger, it’s similarly disinterested in traditional narrative, instead choosing to focus on the destructive circularity of its protagonist’s predilections, each scene/date/fuck pieces of a puzzle McQueen wisely chooses to leave unfinished.  One of the film’s main talking points has been its deliberate aversion to explaining Brandon’s behaviour.  There are clues, and it’s fair to say that much of the film’s power comes in underpinning Brandon and Sissy’s actions with allusions to answers we never receive.  It’s a difficult trick to pull off, especially when so much of the film’s content has already been discussed so widely as to present a sense of déjà-vu when you’re watching the film itself (personally, I didn’t find Carey Mulligan’s rendition of “New York New York” as moving as word-of-mouth would have had me believe), but that’s hardly a just criticism to throw at McQueen’s story itself.  This obfuscating of the characters’ emotions would cripple a film not so wonderfully served by actors absolutely at the peak of their game.  Fassbender arrived to cinema screens seemingly fully-formed with memorable early performances not only in Hunger,but also survival thriller Eden Lake, François Ozon’s romantic pastiche Angel and a small but pivotal role in Inglourious Basterds.  But this is his best role yet, a performance that doesn’t reveal its full complexity until the very end, and whose alternation between restraint and release is endlessly fascinating and – in the end – harrowing to watch.  Mulligan, also, proves good on the promise of An Education, providing a realistic character study in unfettered fucked-upness that perfectly complements the character arc of the protagonist.  It’s not just that you buy them as brother and sister, you believe that you’re seeing the results from the same wounds that have been left to fester for years, untreated and untreatable.  Also worth mentioning is Nicole Beharie, who provides a no less detailed counterpoint to Brandon in a pivotal first date scene that, momentarily, appears to hit pause on his repetitive, emotionally unavailable lifestyle.

Much more than a film about addiction, it also feels reductive to describe Shame as a film primarily concerned with loneliness (even if it’s an emotional state that permeates every frame).  Rather, it’s a finely woven film whose approach towards sex and sexuality is as level-headed as its approach to the intricate psychologies of its endlessly absorbing characters.  Sober (perhaps too much so at times), it’s nevertheless devastating in its unflinching depiction of the circularity of its characters’ mental cycles and, as such, is first rate. 

  1. stripyhorse23 posted this