Rating:
Four Stars (Out of Five)
Steve McQueen’s Shame
is rated NC-17. No, that does not mean it is pornography. What it means is that
children will simply not be able to handle the material, and in this case, the
rating is fitting. I don’t think anybody, young or old, would be able to sit
and watch Shame without feeling
discomfort. It paints a portrait of a man whose life is completely centered
around sex, but it is anything but erotic. Shame
is led by two achingly honest performances by Michael Fassbender and Carey
Mulligan, who make it rightfully painful to watch. Fassbender’s character gets
no real pleasure in life, and neither should we.
Brandon Sullivan (Fassbender) puts up an excellent
façade. He is nonchalant and relaxed in social atmospheres; he does not need to
try hard to pick up women, like his colleague David (James Badge Dale). This
confident carelessness attracts many women to him, all of whom seem ignorant of
his condition. You see Brandon is a sex addict, and a very private one at that.
The only time he really loses it is when someone intrudes on his world of
sexual dysfunction; that someone ends up being his sister Sissy (Mulligan), who
decides to move in with her brother, thus breaking into his private realm and
shattering his routines. Shame
follows Brandon as he struggles to care about someone as a person rather than
an object, whether it be his sister or his cute co-worker Marianne (Nicole
Beharie), who both actually care very much for him.
Steve McQueen seems to have known from the start that
this would be an NC-17 movie, and so could have made it as dirty as he saw fit.
Yet when Brandon has sex, the focus is not on his or anyone else’s actions; the
camera always seems to tell us only how Brandon is feeling, whether it be
through his face or body language, or just the setting. We do not enjoy these
scenes, and it is not because sex makes us squeamish; it’s because we can tell
that Brandon himself is not enjoying it. He seems to take pleasure in getting
women, but once he has them the process of sex is actually very painful for
him. In one pivotal scene, we can see his face screw up in anguish when he is
having a three-way instead of going to see his sister, whose phone messages are
getting increasingly worrying. For Brandon, sex serves as an escape from reality,
but not from himself, and that makes him a decidedly tragic character. It won’t
sit well with a lot of audiences, but the character’s painful journey affected
me as a viewer. I actually cared about Brandon and what he was going through.
The performances are undoubtedly some of the best of the
year; Fassbender is torturously effective in his role, but Carey Mulligan
contributes great depth. It is Sissy’s presence that brings out Brandon’s real
self because she reminds him of whatever terrible, unmentioned experiences they
had together growing up. His emotional insecurity would not show without her
there, and as such, an actress playing that role has to struggle to make her
character more than a cardboard cutout. Mulligan succeeds admirably, blending
Sissy’s own troubled emotional state with the love she doesn’t know how to
express for her brother.
Shame is undeniably
a rough movie-going experience. I would definitely not recommend it for date
night. In fact, there are a lot of people I wouldn’t recommend it to at all. Here
is a film that leaves you in deep thought but empty and heartbroken. Is that a
bad thing? Personally, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Note: I also commend
Steve McQueen and Fox Searchlight for not giving in to pressure to edit Shame down to an R rating; as a
director, your vision should never suffer for the sake of a wider audience.
No comments:
Post a Comment