tederick | 15 Dec 2011 | 679 Views | 3 Likes | 0 Dislikes

Review: Shame

Entering the conversation as “a film with a lot of sex in it,” Shame is more directly a precise essay on addiction – though, I think, it is clawing at something more than that too, beneath the surface. The film abounds with images of gloomy urbanity, characters crowded into tight corners and oblique spaces, creating a kind of onscreen claustrophobia that is only occasionally enlivened by a bit of “the old in-and-out.” Brandon’s disease, in Shame, is his great secret, and its revelation would surely destroy his life. And yet, in the film’s poisoned milieu, populated by poisoned people, I don’t feel like there’s anything that Brandon does in Shame that isn’t paralleled in some other, equally destructive way by all the people he meets. The world of Shame is the world of a civilization destroying itself.

Brandon is a sex addict. If he were merely a two-hooker-a-day playboy, he’d only be some kind of magnificent lothario. We watch him skirt around the edges of his boss’ graceless attempts to pick up a beautiful woman at a bar, only to see Brandon (largely by evasion) successfully take the woman home himself, and if that were the end of it, we might say he was simply “one of those guys” to whom conquest comes disappointingly naturally. But no. He gets the girl, all right; but also – and quite possibly in the space of a single, 24-hour day – beats off repeatedly in the shower and in the bathroom at work, watches porn relentlessly, hires a prostitute or two, and pursues a married woman off the subway off a single look. (This last effort, at least, fails.)

Brandon could be addicted to cocaine, I suppose, or jumping out of planes without a parachute, but in choosing sex addiction for his story, director Steve McQueen has followed Hunger with a film that is just as obsessed with the desecration of the physical body, albeit approached from the opposite direction of impulses. McQueen senses that there is fertile ground, cinematically, beyond the usual movie trope of the more-or-less-explicit sex scene; in Shame, he carries the visual so far that what might theoretically be titillating in other films becomes fully nauseating. There is not a voyeuristic urge in Shame’s proverbial body. If anything, the film seems to be watching us.

It is in the threat of observation that Brandon’s life begins to unravel. He can only operate in secret. The unexpected seizing of his laptop at work – polluted to the gills with pornographic malware – is a minor inconvenience next to the arrival of his uber-flakey sister, Sissy, who barges into Brandon’s apartment and demands room and board. McQueen stages Brandon and Sissy’s first scene (Sissy has been interrupted in mid-shower) by shooting into the bathroom mirror, with Brandon in the real-space foreground, and Sissy – naked – in the reflected-space background. The two characters speak to each other for three minutes without ever, onscreen, seeming to actually be looking at each other. When Brandon makes a half-hearted attempt to kindle a real relationship with a woman from his office, he takes her to a condominium in the sky; the film’s visual geography opens up, for the first and only time, and seems to breathe, only to collapse back down into crushing claustrophobia when Brandon’s attempt fails. He is a condemned man. Secrecy is his only operative path.

There are dramatic set pieces in Shame which are brilliantly excruciating simply by dint of what we know about Brandon, and what we know about human behaviour generally. A go-nowhere first date, filmed entirely in long take, had me scrunching my fingers together and covering my head. At a shmancy bar, Sissy sings “New York, New York” in long, torturous close-up, while Brandon’s dimwit boss gets turned on, and Brandon surrenders himself to the long-ago, unspecified trauma that unites him to Sissy in a dark, unescapable way.

Shame is full of strong performances but is overmatched by Michael Fassbender, who holds himself so taut, even and especially in the midst of his sex, that he seems to be under threat of snapping himself apart from the inside out, ligaments first. One man’s addiction, yes; but more as well. Shame tells of a kind of unquenchable modern momentum, an unavoidable collision, a train running full-speed toward the end of the tracks.

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