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.”

Let the right one in

“The question of what comprises a ‘good childhood’ in current times has generated significant debate and media attention. While there has always been debate about children, today it is especially salient because of the fast pace of change in information and communication technology and because of the perceived pressures of a consumer-based media culture. According to the charity The Children’s Society, which has conducted a major inquiry into childhood, children’s overall well-being is being endangered by excessive individualism in a competitive modern age. It suggests that the increase in the belief that the “prime duty of the individual is to make the most of her own life, rather than contribute to the good of others” has tilted British culture too far “towards the individual pursuit of private interest and success” with several consequences for children:
- high rates of family break-up
- teenage unkindness
- unprincipled advertising
- too much competition in education
- acceptance of income inequality.”

Been reading this today for work. It’s a paper from Futurelab about curriculum and innovation. I’m always a bit suspicious of the good old days argument. Were we or or parents and grandparents more alive to the good of others? I’m not sure. (I think my father’s generation was better at saving, at “doing without”, but that’s another matter). I was thinking about teenage unkindness this week in the context of the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In. Luke Davies, in The Monthly, correctly calls this a “gloriously strange and haunted poem of a film”. The screenplay is written by John Lindqvist who also wrote the best selling novel and the film is made by Tomas Alfredson.

Philip French from the Guardian wrote this apropos of the film: "Three of Scandinavia's greatest artists, the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, his friend the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch and the Danish director Carl Dreyer were fascinated by the subject. Virtually all Strindberg heroines are vampires. Munch's most famous painting after The Scream is his Vampyr, while Dreyer's Vampyr is arguably the greatest of all horror films."

I’ve had several encounters with the vampire genre over the years; the sensationally scary Salem’s Lot (Stephen King), the languid and hip, overhyped Anne Rice novels and more recently The Historian ( Elizabeth Kostova). I remember lying in bed in my parents house reading Stephen King scared out of my wits with the dark glass of the night window only inches away and the possibility of vampires just outside. That was 30 years ago – other things scare me more now. What was scary in Let the Right One In was the depiction of adolescence because that is what the film is fundamentally about. Oskar is 12, a lonely bullied boy who is disconnected from his divorced parents. Like most teenagers, he inhabits a little world of his own. He meets Eli, a dishevelled “12 year old” street girl of a vampire.

The vampire riff works fine as a straight narrative but underneath it is a metaphor for the disturbances of adolescence. Blood. Changing bodies. Uncontrollable events and urges. Stuff that you want to do that is forbidden. Desire. Danger. Fitting in or more usually – not fitting in. Loss of innocence – whatever this means in our society. Disconnection and loneliness – the film deals with these threads so well. The violence of adolescence is played out in all sorts of ways in this film including through Oskar who we meet when he is stabbing a tree with a knife (which is handily standing in for one of his classmates).

It’s also beautifully filmed. Luke Davies says it better than I could: “the stillness, - of framing, of pacing – catches us unawares, in the sense that, as in all good ghost stories, we are lulled unsuspecting into that place where the real and the surreal become interchangeable”. The setting is both banal – suburban Sweden, an apartment block, a school, and really beautiful – crisp snow, slender birches, a white dog against the snow. (A white dog against the snow discovering a body hefted upside down from a tree dripping blood – yes it is a vampire film.) That’s the other thing I loved about the film; Eli is by turns kind of fetching street kid and mouth covered in blood, pretty grisly. It looks real and a bit grotesque. And vulnerable. These two, Eli and Oskar, are kind to each other in this world of teenage unkindness and adult neglect. The film has a great ending. It makes you re-think some of the earlier scenes in new ways. The narrative is left open and ambiguous like the character of Eli. Lovely work.

The Slap

The empty suburbs
propel them in a fruitless
quest for connection.

Yes, the demon haiku strikes again. Maybe it's better than the "reflection demon" which lurked the other morning - I caught sight of a middle-aged woman with fat arms, wearing my shirt, in the window of the train. Aaargh!

More of The Slap later, but it's definitely part of the zeitgeist. Let if be recorded that I didn't love it but I found the first two thirds quite engrossing...

Lemon Tree

Yesterday, in the course of my work, I stopped to think about why the olive branch is a symbol of peace. Fortunately, at least for workplace efficiency, Wikipedia is at hand to respond to idle thoughts like this and it came up with the following; “In Western culture, derived from the customs of Ancient Greece, it (the olive branch) symbolizes peace or goodwill. The original link between olive branches and peace is unknown. Some explanations center on that olive trees take a very long time to bear fruit. Thus the cultivation of olives is something that is generally impossible in time of war.” So there. Not known. And then I thought a bit about Lemon Tree, a film that I saw last week.

The film, made by Israeli director Eran Riklis, explores what happens when the Israeli Minister of Defense and his wife move to a new housing development which is right next to an old grove of lemon trees owned by a Palestinian woman who has inherited the block from her father. The issue becomes one of security – how can a government minister be safe when it is so easy for terrorists to sneak through the grove and lob a grenade into his property? The lemon trees must go. So it’s about property, boundaries, rights, history, fences, large imposing fences, safety and also what happens to the little people in this large historical struggle. Riklis said somewhere that one of his inspirations for making the film was hearing the stories of Palestinian people who had taken their legal issues to the Israeli High Court. The article I read said that he thought that was a tribute to the Israeli justice system. Anyone watching the film will have their own views about that.

The film starts with the domestic. Widowed Salma, played by Hiam Abbass, is making preserved lemons. The camera pans in close as she chops the lemons and adds chilli and liquid. It’s a beautiful, intimate scene. Outside there is the clanking of furniture as two men deliver the furniture belonging to the Minister of Defence, confusingly named Israel, into their new house, overseen by his wife, Mira. By morning, a watchtower has been built, overlooking Salma’s grove and soon after, she receives a letter telling her that the trees must be cut down.

The plot around the receipt of the letter is particularly poignant. The letter is in Hebrew so she can’t read it. She must go to a Palestinian café to have it translated and we see her entering the all-male café, the resultant hush in the room, the offhand treatment from the Palestinian men who are drinking coffee, who let her know that she will lose her trees and also, that she must not accept the compensation offered by Israeli authorities – “We don’t accept their money.” Salma is alone.

Hiam Abbass’ portrayal of this woman is one of the most interesting things about the film. Abbass has a very beautiful strong face and it’s just wonderful seeing an older woman in a really strong role. She conveys strength, hurt, resilience and yearning so so well. I loved watching her. Riklis said that one of the reasons he made this film was his desire to find a good role for this actress – may she be in many more films. Terrible things happen to Abbass but I never felt emotionally manipulated by the film-maker. I felt for her without thinking of her as a victim because she does fight back against the order to lose her lemon grove.

At one stage, in court, she says ”I am a real person” and this is possibly the crux of the larger message; that for too long, people on both sides of this debate have demonised each other. The film also explores the experiences of Mira, the wife of the Minister. Both women are lonely; both have children in the United States and have seemingly little in their lives apart from their respective work. We sympathise with both women who have little power or input in the larger politics of this world.

The ending is particularly dramatic so I won’t give it away. It’s really powerful as a metaphor for what is happening in Israel at present. Maybe it’s naff to think about that Seekers song – “the fruit of the poor lemon – it’s impossible to eat” but somehow that fits with the ending. The fruit of this particular conflict does no one any favours. And is not likely to in the immediate future.