Shame about Shame

I loved Hunger, the last collaboration between Steve McQueen and Michael Fassbender. Shame is a different kettle of fish. Fassbender plays Brandon, a sex addict – which seems to be the major point of the film. He does a bloody good job, reducing sex to the hard yards of any kind of addiction. Not pretty. There is one pretty scene – Brandon eyeing off a young woman on the subway. She is dressed in purple with a perky little hat and the camera rolls around her body in a kind of alluring and erotic fantasy. Everyone has done this – looked over at a perfect stranger and contemplated sex. Focused not on their face but on their body and what it (and yours ) might do. The scene is real, and authentic, and in the end a bit scary.

My hero film reviewer Roger Ebert said this about Shame: “This is a great act of filmmaking and acting. I don't believe I would be able to see it twice.” I wish I could agree. He is right about one thing – the acting is sensational. Ebert says :

“There's a close-up in "Shame" of Michael Fassbender's face showing pain, grief and anger. His character, Brandon, is having an orgasm. For the movie's writer-director, Steve McQueen, that could be the film's master shot. There is no concern about the movement of Brandon's lower body. No concern about his partner. The close-up limits our view to his suffering. He is enduring a sexual function that has long since stopped giving him any pleasure and is self-abuse in the most profound way.”

Shame is about Brandon, some kind of well-paid tertiary sector employee, and his dysfunctional sister, a nightclub sister. He is tightly bounded – she is all over the shop. They have had a difficult childhood. Part of the tension in the film is watching them clash within the tight confines of his expensive but sparsely furnished apartment. I think that what is happening in this film is a kind of parallel process. Just as Brandon uses people for sex in a relentless and joyless way, he too is used by the director. His acting makes this film; if it were plot-line alone, people would leave in drives. So I think people rate this film despite the fact that it leave you feeling kind of ripped off. The New York Times critic says it better than me:

“Is “Shame” the name of something Brandon does feel, or of something the filmmakers think he should feel? The movie, for all its displays of honesty (which is to say nudity), is also curiously coy. It presents Brandon for our titillation, our disapproval and perhaps our envy, but denies him access to our sympathy. I know, that’s the point, that Mr. McQueen wants to show how the intensity of Brandon’s need shuts him off from real intimacy, but this seems to be a foregone conclusion, the result of an elegant experiment that was rigged from the start.”