Shame
Steve McQueen, the artist turned director, is a man who needs no introduction. Shames is is that you always have to. Because whenever him or his movies crop up in conversation, instead of the hushed awe one would expect with a filmmaker of his calibre, it is usually met with “what? The dead actor.” All that is about to change. Anyone who has seen any of McQueen’s work will know what I am talking about. The creator of brutal and agonising Hunger about an IRA starvation activist is set to make bigger waves with his upcoming movie 12 Years A Slave. But tonight, we are looking at his compelling and provoking gem Shame.
Shame, starring McQueen favourite Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan, centres around Brandon; an executive living in New York. However, Brandon is hiding a secret; he is a sex addiction. Breaking up his days with porn, meaningless one night stands and prostitute, Brandon is seemingly indifferent to his illness. That is, until his troubled sister Sissy, appears in his apartment disrupted his life and showing the true weight of his addiction. As cracks start to appear, Brandon struggles to balance his sex addiction, the sorrows of his sister and his lack of emotional connection to anyone. Compelling and brutual, this emotive and insightful look to a shunned addiction will grip you till the bitter end.
What McQueen does here is tell an unnerving tale brilliantly by laying bare Brandon’s dependence on sex. Shame is a courageous and often uncomfortable film that really digs deep in the skin. As stark and old as a craving for drugs, Brandon’s life style is neither condone or condemned here. Instead, McQueen is giving a very truthful insight into someone who seems to pretty balanced on the surface but boils with compulsion and desire. Slicing it with the equally bitter story of his sister Sissy, McQueen only stabs at what we can only imagine a sad childhood for the pair. And while we only grab a little taste of this, it is just as effective in making Brandon a complex, mysterious and altogether human man on the brink of some unwarranted sexual desires.
Written alongside Abi Morgan, McQueen’s heavy drama, though excellently executed in direction and cinematography, is really astonishing due to Fassbender’s fierce performance. Awarded the Volpi cup at the Venice Film Festival, Fassbender pulls the viewer into another excavation of the human soul and body. Playing tortured and charismatic Brandon, Fassbender is purely stellar and never wavers from the story or plight. With Mulligan playing equally well against him as Sissy, it is anyone’s guess that this movie hasn’t any other awards. It definitely deserves more recognition.
But Shame’s greatness is also its detriment when it comes to being awarded. McQueen and Fassbender’s willingness to literally lay naked the explicit addiction certainly made people turn their cheeks and look away. The explicit and plentiful sex scenes earned high rating. Instead of romantic and cuddly sex, it is lonely, cold and flinching. Brandon cannot wrap emotion or lust around sex, when he attempts to, he can’t do it. It is only the unfeeling sex that keeps him going and we see it plenty. Perhaps unsettling those with a puritan view of sexual relations, Shame was seemingly snubbed by major award academy’s.
Yet Shame is outstanding and only a man as meticulous and attentive as McQueen has a bravery to bring such a taboo subject to the big screen. Only someone as emotive and genius as McQueen can make a climatic sex scene unsexy, unfeeling and upsetting. Shame is thought provoking and yes, hard to watch. It will leave you empty.
But, I guess, that is rather the point.
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