Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011)

Next week we will have the Academy Awards ceremony where the best movies of the year are competing for the most prestigious film prices in Hollywood. Every year at least a part of the nominees can be politically or sentimentally justified. If your movie was on Oprah, handles a delicate American subject like 9/11 or portrays a well-known historical figure or event your film is likely to be nominated or even win. Portraying a man who suffers from a sex addiction resulting in an intense movie with explicit sexual content and which is outstanding in both directing and performances might be ignored.

Shame shows us the life of Brandon (Michael Fassbender) who is a successful and good-looking man living in New York who seems careless and distant from the world around him. In the opening sequence of the movie we see how Brandon starts the day masturbating in the shower, from the next scene we will learn how Brandon seemingly needs more satisfaction as he gets aroused by a girl he flirts with on the subway. His need for sexual arousal and satisfaction seems to have a compulsive nature as he watches porn the minute he comes home from work. Brandon is a sex addict.

One day he gets a visit from his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) who he unexpectedly finds in his bathroom and who wants to crash at his place having nowhere else to go. Brandon is everything but excited to have a visitor who is a burden on him in his disturbing private routines. Soon Sissy turns out to be a somewhat unstable and emotionally dependant girl who is looking for her brother’s warmth and company which he cannot give her, in fact it infuriates him. We are looking at a brother and sister who are both trying to cope with a difficult past in their own way. Even though their personalities and lifestyles seem to be opposite, both their lives are dictated by whatever happened in their past (luckily the movie doesn’t explain).

Director Steve McQueen (not to be confused with the legendary actor) is confronting his viewer with the emptiness and superficiality our protagonist is living in. His directing is very stylish with beautiful long takes and effective compositions. The scenes where Brandon is jogging down the Manhattan sidewalks and appears to be alone in one of the biggest cities in the world are perfect.

At first it felt like I was looking at the real American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman but when Sissy is introduced in Brandon’s life he shows true emotion and as a viewer you start to realize that he might have deeper motivations. It is in the (beautiful) scene where Sissy is singing Sinatra’s New York, New York when we see a first glance of emotion from a guy who never showed us any before. Later, Brandon is trying to feel for a girl he met at work and had a date with but doesn’t manage to cope with emotional involvement. He needs sex to cover the pain he feels for whatever happened in his past. It doesn’t matter if the sexual stimulation comes from a prostitute, random stranger from a bar or even a man. He needs physical stimulation to feel anything and he prefers to have it with an unknown. McQueen captures this perfectly when Brandon orgasms while in a threesome, his face in close-up showing nothing but pain, and not even the slightest bit of joy.

With Shame, Carey Mulligan but especially Michael Fassbender is giving a daring and outstanding performance. His acting is both subtle (the singing scene) and brutal in some of the bar or bed scenes. Director Steve McQueen gives us a movie that is tense, confronting, depressing but at the same time beautiful and sometimes even funny. Next week this movie will not be mentioned, which in itself is a ……

9/10