I think I can only explain my response to Shame by telling you about the movie I saw Christmas evening with my parents: Pina by Win Wenders, which is a documentary about the recently deceased German choreography Pina Bausch.
My mother took me to see Bausch a few times in the 80s and 90s, and when bits of the dances I saw then came up on the screen they seemed as familiar as if I’d seen them last week, instead of several decades ago, they had made that powerful an impression on me-I still think they may be the most powerful live performances I’ve ever seen.
I think I expected a more straightforward documentary, but it's not that. Wenders had set out to make a movie about Bausch, but before he could start filming, she’d died suddenly. Rather than canceling, he went ahead and made a movie that is basically about her dancers’ response to her death-both in words, and in movement. Not much time has passed, so their response it pretty raw and unformed, and so it’s a very beautiful, powerful, and yes, extremely sad movie, but kind of inchoate. (my mom and I loved it, my dad utterly and furiously bored).
What’s interesting is that you start to see how dependent the dances Bausch made were on the kinds of relationships she cultivated with her dancers-they had to be intensely close, and she had to recruit the kinds of dancers who were interested in a kind of physical and emotional brinksmanship-who would do endless trust falls and leaps, and who would dance in mud or water or with their eyes closed. She’s one of those choreographers who was interested less in the how dancers looked than in how they moved (and so her dancers are older, younger, less symmetrically formed, etc., than you see even in some modern dance troops. This is an aesthetic I love).
Here’s the trailer:
Click to view
So, I think when I saw Shame the next day, I was in an way less struck by the content of the film than by the ongoing McQueen/Fassbender collaboration (which I'm fascinated by anyway), and the qualities it shared with what I’d seen the night before-the same interest in physical and emotional brinksmanship, with the level of visceral expressiveness one is able to convey (the school of dance Bausch belongs to is often called “Expressionism”).
Because, as with Hunger, McQueen could never have made the movie without an actor who was will to go to the lengths of (seeming) self-exposure that Fassbender is (and no, I’m not just talking about the Fassdong, truly impressive as that is). And Fassbender wouldn’t have been able to deliver the performance he does without a director who he seems to love and trust and who knows how to push him into the kinds of physical expression of emotional states he does here (cf. whoever directed Jane Eyre). As with Hunger, there are long stretches where Fassy doesn’t say a word, just stares, or runs, or cries, you, y’know, fucks anything that moves.
In some ways, then, the form is more impressive than the content. I don’t think Shame is quite as good a movie as Hunger, partly because the narrative comes very close to a conventional morality tale about empty sex being evil, and partly because it’s trying to portray real uncertainty and weakness, and that comes across as basically a manpain marathon. But it’s still haunting and powerful and well-worth seeing, even if it too is very, very sad.