SHAME
(Steve McQueen, 2011)
Turner prize winning artist Steve McQueen’s second feature film Shame opened Cinecity – The Brighton Film Festival on Thursday night. Shame is a stark and harrowing portrayal of sex addiction, isolation and loneliness, boasting remarkable lead performances and a scarily beautiful realized vision.
Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, a successful man in a somewhat nondescript office job with an active social life in New York City. However beneath his seemingly comfortable life he is tormented, dealing with an unquenchable sex addiction. When his younger sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) comes to stay with him in his apartment, Brandon’s way of life is thrown drastically of kilter.
Making a film where the crux of the narrative is sex addiction could have made for difficult navigation, but director McQueen excels in delivering a film that doesn’t dwell on, over rely on or trivialize the sex aspect. There is plenty of (graphic) sex within the film, but it is interwoven with the overriding theme of the story, which is isolation and how we live today.
From the long opening sequence of Brandon waking up naked and alone in his cold, bland (yet exceptionally neat) apartment, to him furiously jacking off in the shower, the film balances the potentially graphic/shocking/provocative sex scenes with a more unthreatening photographic beauty which lingers on the characters faces and a wonderfully captured view of NYC. There are plenty of long scenes with plenty of gazing back forth between characters, and long tracking shots following Brandon around the city and his apartment. Some of these moments can seem a bit contrived and perhaps are types of filmic techniques that are wearing a bit thin. However, McQueen sure knows how to make his shots and frames look fantastic and Fassbender and Mulligan are fine enough actors to let the camera linger on them for as long as it wants and they can keep the film flowing without having to say very much at all yet still deliver the complexities of the emotional story. Both Fassbender and Mulligan execute their roles fantastically, and bring layers to their characters who on paper a very minimal and two-dimensional. Fassbenders performance is all the more remarkable because he makes a character that is very cold, minimal and often unlikeable seem somehow engaging and encourages empathy.
It is perhaps the ying and yang effect of the brother and sisters personas that is the real emotional draw to the film. Both are very different people seemingly lost in this world and at this time, and neither are quite prepared for dealing with it. Yet both act and react in very different ways, which can lead to traumatising and devastating results.
Shamedoes not perhaps deliver a film that is as provocative and poignant as it makes itself out to be, yet there are genuine moments of filmic enlightenment here that accurately and vividly explore complex, powerful, personal and universal themes.
Cinecity will be screening more highly anticipated previews over the next two weeks, and a whole programme of features, shorts, animations, videos, talks and experiences, Check it all out here:
