Steve McQueen’s new film Shame (co-written with Abi Morgan who wrote The Hour and The Iron Lady) is about life in an aimless, godless, unfettered universe and the various ugly/arousing sexual events that populate a few weeks in the life of a rich Irish atheist New Yorker called Brandon (Michael Fassbender who was Bobby Sands in Hunger and Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre) after his sister Sissie (Carey Mulligan), a love-bruised nightclub songstress and frequent suicide, comes to sleep on his couch for a while.
It is not made clear why he doesn’t want her there. They may have committed incest while teenagers when drugged or drunk; or not. She may have attempted suicide while pregnant, and miscarried and become infertile; or not. She is certainly a mess, ‘flinging herself’, as we used to say, at man after man and sobbing her love and masochism down the phone after one-night stands and crawling into his bed for comfort he refuses to give. We all know girls like this; or we used to.
What is disturbing is not so much his cruelty to her, for we can readily understand this, but his attitude to women in general. He is implacably determined not to marry any of them, or breed with any of them, or to have a relationship longer than his longest, which was four months in toto. He watches porn, and tosses off a lot, and his sister çheerfully, shamingly, catches him at it. He fails to maintain erections with ‘normal’ girls but makes it easily with hookers, whom he humps and buggers and threesomely grapples, in visible moral agony while at his grimy exertions.
It would be wrong to say this is ‘graphically’ shown, though you see almost everything that is done or attempted. It is more correct to say that McQueen, a former war artist who portrayed shattered corpses in Iraq, unveils a landscape of metropolitan desolation like that which Michelangelo Antonioni attempted, but much, much more successfully.
His visual style is both austere and ravishing. Shots in which nothing apparently happens for minutes on end are held and we look deeply into them as we would a Dutch Renaissance painting. In one of them he woos, if that’s the word I want, while ordering dinner and wine in a sumptuous restaurant and a pretentious waiter constantly interrupts the flow of his wooing, a beautiful mixed-race divorcee Marianne (Nicole Beharie) and tells her frankly and confrontingly that he can’t see why anybody would want to marry, dismaying and arousing her, and their ‘relationship’, such as it is, rises into hope and slides down into pointlessness — and, at best, a promised one-night stand —all in this one beautiful unmoving wide shot, in which you see and understand everything. And you share her shock too when next day on their first rushed exciting encounter in his flat he fails to get it up, and tells her to go, and hires a prostitute and violently has her from behind, hurting her.
It is not insignificant I think that Brandon is an Irishman, albeit one migrated in his teens to America. He may be the first Irishman in world literature to feel himself free of all family obligation, and all notion of love received and love given, temptation yielded to and sin forgiven and the power of prayer. He is a kind of psychopath, but not quite; he is moved to a single tear when his sister sings, very slowly, with a kind of lost and baffled tenderness, ‘New York, New York’ as Piaf might have sung of Paris. What he is feeling, or remembering, we do not know.
He is, I guess, what might be called the Present Human Tendency, closer in his values to a Muslim polygamist, selecting and discarding women as he chooses, from among those he despises enough to deem worth wooing. A young man who told me he found as a rule the first six months of a relationship the most interesting, and he always ended it after that, is much like him, and a dreadful unforeseen consequence of the sexual revolution that I, for one, was very keen on once, and now am troubled by.
And yet he doesn’t lie to his women. His friend from the office David does (James Badge Dale), and he despises him for it. And one night after he seduces Sissie, who responds to him in the usual sobbing, hyperbolic way, Brandon goes out into red-light streets in the hope of getting himself killed.
This is a remarkable film, as telling in its way as Snowtown or An Education or Hardcore or Taxi Driver or Samson and Delilah. It tells you things you do not want to know. They are undeniable, and yet you strive to deny them even as they pass before your eyes.
It argues, I fear, that whole Sexual Revolution of the 60s and and the 70s was catastrophic for women. It left them with no safe harbour, no real advocates and no defensive weaponry. In the old world order of shotgun marriages, hardworking harried husbands in boring lifetime jobs, six o’clock closing, cheap mortgages, four children, two miscarriages and family Christmas holidays, and the palliative legend of True Love, forty out of a hundred of them had a fair chance of getting through life undrugged, uncrazed and unsuicidal. This is no longer so. Women concentrate now on their diets, and female friends they can trust and bitch to, and try to make sense of the one-night stands and the casual regretted abortions and the fading hope of a man who will stay and the single child they may or may not be able to fit in between their other, increasingly frantic priorities as the clock ticks and their life adds up to nothing. And it’s a pity.
Michael Fassbender is shaping up as the Brando/Olivier/Depardieu of our day and gives a performance, with huge dick swinging and haunted eyes that see all and comprehend all but do not care, a performance vast as Hamlet you cannot imagine if you have not seen it. Carrie Mulligan likewise amazes us with a raw impelling victimhood and sullen traumatised poignancy and great singing that even Shirley MacLaine in her youth could not have summoned, and only Mia Wasikowska might lately on a good day equal, as she did in In Treatment and Mr Nobbs. Nicole Beeharie and James Badge Dale are especially good in the supporting roles, and the girl on the train at the start and end of the film amazing.
An astonishing film. Do not imagine you can miss it.
Name:
I saw Carnage yesterday and wonder if it is the flip side to this film’s coin. Jodie Foster’s outfit made me quite uncomfortable throughout – deep purple teamed with dark brown and maroon. The geometric patterned rug in the loungeroom was hideous and the light had that dank European quality but without the romantic mist. The cruelty was in the mise-en-scene and everything else came as a relief and a distraction.
Movies based on plays tend to be a bit claustrophobic…
I thought you would have liked it seeing you like all that uncivil verbal warfare.
I liked the uncivil verbal warfare, don’t get me wrong. The more debauched it got, the sweeter they all became. But check out Jodie Foster’s outfit next time you walk past a poster and tell me that isn’t pure sadism.
Shots when nothing happens for minutes on end?
Thanks for the tip – I won’t see this film.
Yes, like you won’t go to a Rolling Stones concert because you have to queue up for hours. Or go to Gallipoli for Anzac Day because it takes twenty hours to fly there.
What kind of a response is that? Two minutes is too long for you? Does that include orgasms?
What are you talking about?
Mr Ellis, if I want to gaze and gaze -
I’ll go to an art gallery.
I’ve been to Gallipoli. With a soldier.
A veteran! You know what that means.
How many has he killed, you ask?
“I’ve been to Gallipoli. With a soldier.
A veteran! You know what that means.
How many has he killed, you ask?”
No Bob, don’t believe this on face value. Sorry. Something’s not right.
Korean War veteran. The un-won war.
And no, you don’t get the Regimental number, Busybody.
Stay away from my comments.
Did nothing happen at Gallipoli for two minutes on end?
Why did you go there?
You regret it, surely.
I swear I tried hard not to look back.
You’re right, of course.
Didn’t think it through
Please go and see “A Separation”, and rejoice in the realisation of what film making, brilliant scriptwriting and ensemble acting can achieve concerning human relationships. They should lock Polanski away for life for making Ghostwriter and give him hard labour for making Carnage.
‘Separation’ is on my list movies to see,but not ‘Carnage’, don’t know if I want to see ‘Shame’, have forgotten about ‘Ghostwriter’.
No need for me to go to Sydney to see ‘Separation’,it has arrived at my little hamlet, can’t wait to see it this weekend…
Not my stuff i’m afraid. I like lighter, Japanese and Chinese art in film.
I’ve known a lot of speed addicts who have the lives mentioned in Bob’s movie pic. Nothing excites,no joy from just pure life. A magic day just passes them by.They end up self centred, aloof in a friendship and relationship looking for the big hits and come knocking on your door after some years saying they were stupid and should have been with you after turning you inside out.
Black art.
Bob could you please return my key.
Carnage was light hearted and quite funny thanks purely to the acting. I had a free movie ticket due to expire on the 31 March and it was this or Margin Call.
I’m not a worthy person in my tastes but I never claimed to be. No, my problem with Polanski was the final scene of Rosemary’s Baby. I felt he could have taken a slightly more metaphorical tack.
Margin Call is very fine and like a play also. Like an episode of Philco Playhouse by Paddy Chayevsky or Gore Vidal in 1955.
See them all.
That’s the choice? The Playboy mansion or domestic servitude? I prefer the model of the crazy herb lady who lives alone on a sunny hillside experimenting with alternative medicine. Those ladies used to be a dime a dozen until the medical establishment came along and deliberately laid waste to their specialist area of expertise. No doubt they had their own form of valium, distilled from hollyhock, black pepper and a whole lot of nutmeg.
The herb lady. The third way.
A few other ways i think,find another half that clicks.Gotta have a purpose,aim, goal. Art, nature, travel. Serene is good. Bit of the desert, bit of the coast and rainforest, bit of the ocean ,bit of the city.Ex or Intro.
Being used is a bummer.
It’s not a matter of historical record but I’m sure herb ladies would have had consorts, jim, don’t you worry. Probably woodcutters from the small village in the valley. She would get him to chop a few logs for the fire seeing as he’s there and afterwards he’d get his wood cut as well.
Woodcutters, plumbers, milkman,yep i get the picture.Sounds like country Queensland.The doctor and the chemist winking as the crab cream goes out in little batches.
It’s like you’ve reached into our feminine souls, Bob, and laid them bare. Diets, bitching, casual regretted abortions… we’re into all of that.
I just want to clarify, for all time, here and now. If a man doesn’t have children, is it still possible for his life to amount to anything? Is there a clear gender delineation here? Women – have babies or be a worthless nothing?
And Jim, while we’re on the subject, do you really need a prescription for crab cream?
Miranda Devine believes George Clooney is a perfect man. But Clooney doesn’t have children (that we’re told about).
This makes him not a ‘perfect’ man.
And I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure he’s a Democrat. I wonder why she doesn’t pick someone from her own side to laud.
No i’d guess not, but it pays for some to watch the stock rotation if not just for entertainment purposes.
Herb ladies, I’ve heard, were very discreet. They used to just slip people a tincture on street corners as you would a parcel of crack cocaine.
To Reader 1:
If you missed the point of my article, which was an apology to women I had used and cast aside, you must be terrifically insensitive.
If, as I believe, we fucked in the past, I am sorry for that too.
I completely missed the point of the article. Call me terrifically insensitive.
I can only wish, Bob, but it’s happened in my head.
Reader 1, you are worse than insensitive, and I’m being polite here, after all this is not my blog. You are giving a bad name to readers.
I don’t like you either, Helvi, that’s the thing. I think you are a powder puff who clumsily hides her dark side behind a blatant veneer of tartuffery.
” …a love-bruised nightclub songstress and frequent suicide …”
Don’t tell me, she killed herself more than once? What a remarkable woman.
How would you express it?
In the film she really meant to kill herself and had many scars on her wrists and arms.
How else would you express it?
But can she sing Terrance? Can make any movie worth visiting and always worth the search to put it in.A unique voice in the movie that is.
Ms Mulligan sings like Shirley Mclean in ‘Two Mules for Sister Sarah’, but that was before she’d topped herself many times.
Didn’t see Two Mules. Was thinking more of Two For The Seesaw and Some Came Running.
I got hold of the DVD “Margaret” about Thatcher played by Lindsay Duncan, as recommended by Bob. And it is a much better film than The Iron Lady, in fact TIL seems to be a shorter version of the BBC film, with some identical scenes, law suit identical for that matter.
Duncan didn’t have the Thatcher voice, but that may have been a conscious decision in order to avoid parody, as John Major was also played without his distinctive voice but with sinister Machiavallian menace. Geoffrey Howe they got very well, but unfortunately they had a fat guy playing Norman Tebbit, when they could have saved money by better employing the Spitting Image rubber puppet which was much closer physically to Tebbit than the human actor.
The DVD came paired with the Long Walk to Finchley which I haven’t managed to see as yet.
It’s got a back beat and you can dance to it, I liked it and give it three and half stars.