shame (film review)
I saw Shame! It's a beautiful, though sad and sometimes difficult film.
The movie is locked entirely into the viewpoint of the main character, Brandon. Only the things he truly pays attention to come into focus, with all else falling into the hazy background... little details, like what he does for a living and how he feels about anything.
The film is slowly paced and carefully shot, sometimes visually appealing, with a composed and deliberate unloveliness at other times. My husband noted how authentic the lighting seemed on the subway scenes, making everyone look almost corpselike.
There are many lengthy shots of Michael Fassbender as Brandon looking troubled, lips parted, his expression all but frozen. It's suitably enigmatic-- Brandon seems to be a mystery even to himself-- and over and over, it feels a little different every time.
And there are a lot of sex scenes, none of them gratuitous. Every encounter contributes to the story. Brandon's compulsively trying to escape his problems through sex, only for compulsive sex to become his biggest problem.
I admired a lot of the ways I felt the film was cleverly setting expectations and disarming the audience in the beginning. Steve McQueen seems to have foreseen that people would make a big deal out of, not just the sex scenes, but in particular, Fassbender's full frontal exposure.
So rather than let the audience get distracted looking for it and waiting to get a glimpse, the male nudity is right up front in the earliest scenes, which economically set up the character. Brandon wakes up and stares blankly before finally getting up. His morning routine is repeated across a few days. He walks around his apartment nude; he doesn't have to conceal himself because no one is ever there. He plays his answering machine, ignoring increasingly desperate messages from a female voice, so desensitized that he lets it play with her voice pleading and calling his name while he takes a piss, fires up the shower, steps in and jerks off. (If there's any more succinct visual shorthand to show dismissal than someone taking a piss while listening to a voice crying out to them, I can't think of it.) Letting the messages play and erase, taking the morning piss, and getting out the first orgasm of the day all seem to be the same to him: rote eliminations.
Talking about the movie with
helens78, I thought she made a great point: having Fassbender in this role is valuable not just because he performs it so well, but because it helps to remove what might otherwise be a distraction from the story, namely, how is this guy getting laid so much? Answer: because even though he's not glammed up at all, still... he looks like Michael Fassbender. Not that it's all conquest with him-- the majority of his encounters are with professionals.
helens78 also perceptively noticed that the only person who claims to have any information at all about Brandon is the woman he can most effectively keep at a distance: a camgirl.
The most obvious plot point occurs when Brandon's sister crashes at his place, crowding him and interrupting his habits, but even aside from that, there are several indications that his life isn't sustainable. He's perpetually late, and his excuses seem to be wearing thin. His married boss likes to take Brandon out to bars with him and attempt to pick up women, but even that guy presses him about missing meetings, and obliquely warns Brandon to quit surfing porn on his work computer. Brandon self-destructively hits on a woman right in front of her boyfriend, laughing as the guy gets visibly riled. It's not just his sister disrupting his routine. Brandon can't keep this up forever and he seems to know it.
Carey Mulligan as Sissy tumbles messily off of the answering machine and into the story. Neither of the siblings can handle intimacy. Brandon can't connect; Sissy attaches indiscriminately and too quickly. Not long after showing up at Brandon's, she's sobbing into the phone telling someone over and over that she loves him. Soon after, she sleeps with a man shortly after meeting him, and in a days-later scene, she's leaving him clingy messages with no indication he's made any contact with her again since then. Whether it's Brandon's detachment or Sissy's over-attachment, they're both distorting their relationships and pushing people away.
All credit to Michael Fassbender for the climactic scene of Brandon's arc. Brandon breaks down and cries, and that moment has to strike an almost impossible balance. It can't be too little or it will feel anticlimactic; it can't be too much or it won't feel real. I thought he got it. I felt for him.
I loved the denouement and the ending a lot. The film sets up the clear possibility that we've just been seeing one lap around the track Brandon is going to keep running. He moves from habit to indulgence to remorse, but the opening repetition of his morning ritual and the many cuts on Sissy's arms suggest cycles of self-abuse that could easily continue into the future. But the film also leaves open the chance that maybe, this time... maybe not.
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Spoiler space.
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There are a few scenes that seem to divide opinions strongly. One features Carey Mulligan as Brandon's sister performing "New York, New York" at a dirge-like tempo.
I was really glad that I already knew that the movie depicts the whole song and nothing else really happens while she sings it. I feel that if I didn't know that ahead of time, I would have been wondering whether something was going to happen during the song and it would have seemed like it was dragging on and on.
But since I knew it was just going to be her singing, I felt better able to relax and enjoy it. I appreciated that Carey Mulligan didn't oversing it. She has a good voice, and I'm sure if she'd wanted to sing the song more prettily, she could have. But she sang it with a little bit of tremulous unsteadiness, and that fit the character and the movie better.
I also read that Brandon goes on a very awkward first date, so I was braced for that. I'm very, very sensitive to embarrassment humor, but the date didn't hit my squick. To me, it wasn't embarrassment-humor awkward, it was just realistically fumbling.
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I have an issue with some reviews of the movie. To me it feels like some reviewers are trying to show they are Taking The Movie Seriously by saying that despite the topic of sex addiction, the NC-17 rating, the nudity, and the many sex scenes, Shame isn't hot, because the sex is joyless.
I must differ. Brandon does not have to be having a good time for me to enjoy watching him have sex. I can find the story sad, and still find the sex scenes hot. No matter how detached he looks or how mournful the soundtrack, Brandon is still played by Michael Fassbender looking gorgeous. And mileage will vary, but to me, the fact that often he looks unhappy/angsty/nearly tortured during the sex is a feature, not a bug.
Shame reminds me of Safe, a film by Todd Haynes that starred Julianne Moore in one of her first career-making leading roles. Safe is ostensibly about the main character's struggle with multiple chemical sensitivity, but like Shame and sex addiction, the malady isn't the real point: Safe is a character study of a person out of touch with herself who feels increasingly out of control even after ordering her life to the point of sterility. I think Shame is actually a more hopeful film. Brandon seems like a stranger to himself for most of the running time, and by the end, he may still not be acquainted, but he does at least seem to have been introduced.
http://cesare.dreamwidth.org/139501.html |
comments | Comment at Dreamwidth
The movie is locked entirely into the viewpoint of the main character, Brandon. Only the things he truly pays attention to come into focus, with all else falling into the hazy background... little details, like what he does for a living and how he feels about anything.
The film is slowly paced and carefully shot, sometimes visually appealing, with a composed and deliberate unloveliness at other times. My husband noted how authentic the lighting seemed on the subway scenes, making everyone look almost corpselike.
There are many lengthy shots of Michael Fassbender as Brandon looking troubled, lips parted, his expression all but frozen. It's suitably enigmatic-- Brandon seems to be a mystery even to himself-- and over and over, it feels a little different every time.
And there are a lot of sex scenes, none of them gratuitous. Every encounter contributes to the story. Brandon's compulsively trying to escape his problems through sex, only for compulsive sex to become his biggest problem.
I admired a lot of the ways I felt the film was cleverly setting expectations and disarming the audience in the beginning. Steve McQueen seems to have foreseen that people would make a big deal out of, not just the sex scenes, but in particular, Fassbender's full frontal exposure.
So rather than let the audience get distracted looking for it and waiting to get a glimpse, the male nudity is right up front in the earliest scenes, which economically set up the character. Brandon wakes up and stares blankly before finally getting up. His morning routine is repeated across a few days. He walks around his apartment nude; he doesn't have to conceal himself because no one is ever there. He plays his answering machine, ignoring increasingly desperate messages from a female voice, so desensitized that he lets it play with her voice pleading and calling his name while he takes a piss, fires up the shower, steps in and jerks off. (If there's any more succinct visual shorthand to show dismissal than someone taking a piss while listening to a voice crying out to them, I can't think of it.) Letting the messages play and erase, taking the morning piss, and getting out the first orgasm of the day all seem to be the same to him: rote eliminations.
Talking about the movie with
helens78, I thought she made a great point: having Fassbender in this role is valuable not just because he performs it so well, but because it helps to remove what might otherwise be a distraction from the story, namely, how is this guy getting laid so much? Answer: because even though he's not glammed up at all, still... he looks like Michael Fassbender. Not that it's all conquest with him-- the majority of his encounters are with professionals.
helens78 also perceptively noticed that the only person who claims to have any information at all about Brandon is the woman he can most effectively keep at a distance: a camgirl.
The most obvious plot point occurs when Brandon's sister crashes at his place, crowding him and interrupting his habits, but even aside from that, there are several indications that his life isn't sustainable. He's perpetually late, and his excuses seem to be wearing thin. His married boss likes to take Brandon out to bars with him and attempt to pick up women, but even that guy presses him about missing meetings, and obliquely warns Brandon to quit surfing porn on his work computer. Brandon self-destructively hits on a woman right in front of her boyfriend, laughing as the guy gets visibly riled. It's not just his sister disrupting his routine. Brandon can't keep this up forever and he seems to know it.
Carey Mulligan as Sissy tumbles messily off of the answering machine and into the story. Neither of the siblings can handle intimacy. Brandon can't connect; Sissy attaches indiscriminately and too quickly. Not long after showing up at Brandon's, she's sobbing into the phone telling someone over and over that she loves him. Soon after, she sleeps with a man shortly after meeting him, and in a days-later scene, she's leaving him clingy messages with no indication he's made any contact with her again since then. Whether it's Brandon's detachment or Sissy's over-attachment, they're both distorting their relationships and pushing people away.
All credit to Michael Fassbender for the climactic scene of Brandon's arc. Brandon breaks down and cries, and that moment has to strike an almost impossible balance. It can't be too little or it will feel anticlimactic; it can't be too much or it won't feel real. I thought he got it. I felt for him.
I loved the denouement and the ending a lot. The film sets up the clear possibility that we've just been seeing one lap around the track Brandon is going to keep running. He moves from habit to indulgence to remorse, but the opening repetition of his morning ritual and the many cuts on Sissy's arms suggest cycles of self-abuse that could easily continue into the future. But the film also leaves open the chance that maybe, this time... maybe not.
.
.
.
Spoiler space.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
There are a few scenes that seem to divide opinions strongly. One features Carey Mulligan as Brandon's sister performing "New York, New York" at a dirge-like tempo.
I was really glad that I already knew that the movie depicts the whole song and nothing else really happens while she sings it. I feel that if I didn't know that ahead of time, I would have been wondering whether something was going to happen during the song and it would have seemed like it was dragging on and on.
But since I knew it was just going to be her singing, I felt better able to relax and enjoy it. I appreciated that Carey Mulligan didn't oversing it. She has a good voice, and I'm sure if she'd wanted to sing the song more prettily, she could have. But she sang it with a little bit of tremulous unsteadiness, and that fit the character and the movie better.
I also read that Brandon goes on a very awkward first date, so I was braced for that. I'm very, very sensitive to embarrassment humor, but the date didn't hit my squick. To me, it wasn't embarrassment-humor awkward, it was just realistically fumbling.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I have an issue with some reviews of the movie. To me it feels like some reviewers are trying to show they are Taking The Movie Seriously by saying that despite the topic of sex addiction, the NC-17 rating, the nudity, and the many sex scenes, Shame isn't hot, because the sex is joyless.
I must differ. Brandon does not have to be having a good time for me to enjoy watching him have sex. I can find the story sad, and still find the sex scenes hot. No matter how detached he looks or how mournful the soundtrack, Brandon is still played by Michael Fassbender looking gorgeous. And mileage will vary, but to me, the fact that often he looks unhappy/angsty/nearly tortured during the sex is a feature, not a bug.
Shame reminds me of Safe, a film by Todd Haynes that starred Julianne Moore in one of her first career-making leading roles. Safe is ostensibly about the main character's struggle with multiple chemical sensitivity, but like Shame and sex addiction, the malady isn't the real point: Safe is a character study of a person out of touch with herself who feels increasingly out of control even after ordering her life to the point of sterility. I think Shame is actually a more hopeful film. Brandon seems like a stranger to himself for most of the running time, and by the end, he may still not be acquainted, but he does at least seem to have been introduced.
http://cesare.dreamwidth.org/139501.html |
comments | Comment at Dreamwidth