Shame

Shame – The trouble with making a film about an anomic loner is that nothing much can happen. The loner stays alone. He becomes ever more alienated. Something bad happens. There is a lot of silence. This is not much of a story and, so, of course, the film makers have to introduce some interruption to the loner’s solitude – this produces, at least, the vestige of a narrative. Steve McQueen’s elegant and glacially beautiful Shame (2011) follows this pattern. The movie’s protagonist, the Byronically handsome Michael Fassbender, is a sex addict. He spends his spare time chatting with naked girls on the internet, masturbating at work, seducing women that he meets in bars and on the subway and entertaining prostitutes in his icy, mostly empty apartment. The sex addict’s sister, an emotionally desperate cabaret singer – are there still cabaret singers in NYC? – shows up unexpectedly at this apartment, Brother and sister have an ambiguous, sexualized relationship – she prances around naked a lot in his apartment. Fassbender’s character takes a stab at a conventional boy-girl dating relationship with a beautiful co-worker, fails in their sexual encounter, and, then, embarks on the equivalent of a erotic bender, a sort of sexual “lost weekend” compressed into a single night of frenzied activity. The hero, if that’s what he should be called, talks dirty to a girl in a bar in front of her boyfriend, gets the crap kicked out of him, stumbles into a gay bar where he enjoys (also not the right word) some oral sex. He, then, takes the subway to the apartment of two obliging prostitutes who stage a spectacular ménage a trois, shot in honeyed amber light and featuring enormous close-ups of breasts, bouncing buttocks, and orgasmic faces. Our hero finally climaxes, his face haggard, brutalized, and despairing – this scene, which is ridiculous, reminds me of Woody Allen’s comment about women discussing the quality of their orgasms: Woody says: “I never had one that wasn’t right on the money.” Of course, there is a price that must be paid for sexual abandon. While Fassbender’s character is cavorting with the two luscious prostitutes, his poor sister slashes both wrists and almost dies. Shame, although rated NC-17, is highly conventional in its morality and the film follows Hays’ Code conventions: immorality must be punished and punished severely in the lengthy scene in which the protagonist tries to stop his sister’s bleeding in the scarlet-smeared bathroom where she has tried to kill herself – an act committed only after numerous efforts to summon her narcissistic brother to her side by calls placed to his cell-phone muted during the orgy. This is a rather prudish, censorious film despite it’s lurid subject matter and the tone of the picture is mournful – on the soundtrack we hear Bach’s Goldberg Variations as played by Glenn Gould and the images are ascetic, very long takes filmed at medium distance, In one sequence, the hero’s sister sings the single most lugubrious version of the song New York, New York ever recorded while Fassbender’s character weeps. In other sequences, the hero sits alone watching old cartoons shown as blurred backdrop to the backside of his head – this is a long scene and, when the sister comes to snuggle with him, quite dramatic, but it is certainly absurdly morose. Shame is simple-minded, but elegantly shot and nicely acted. But there’s really nothing to it. Furthermore, a film like this succumbs to the same syndrome that afflicts anti-war movies, that is unnecessary and distracting glamorization of the subject matter. It’s hard to shoot a battle scene without making it exciting. Similarly, it’s hard to shoot a sex scene involving beautiful actors and actresses without the entire thing collapsing into the specious glamour of a Calvin Klein underwear commercial or a perfume ad. The big orgy with the two girls (porno stars I see by the closing credits) makes everything look so exciting, erotic, and, even, wholesome – all that muscle, those firm bodies, that vigorous exercise – that you can’t help but feeling that the miserable hero is a real kill-joy to be so sorrowful during these proceedings. Movie stars are movie stars. If the film had possessed the courage of its convictions and shown the sex as squalid, grotesque, stupid-looking the picture might have been much more successful. In the Mexican film Battle in Heaven, Carlos Reygardas stages sex scenes between fat, old people – these sequences are just as vigorous as the erotic stuff in Shame but make points that McQueen is afraid of.