Review: 'SHAME'
Director: 'McQUEEN, STEVE'
Writen By: 'Abbie Morgan, Steve McQueen'
- Starring: 'Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, James Badge dale, Nicole Behari, Robert Montano.'
- Genre: 'Romance'
- Release Date: '13th January 2012'
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Our Rating:
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Shame is the new film by the artist turned director Steve McQueen and is not to be confused with any of the other 20 or so films also called Shame.
This Shame is a rather elegiac look at sex addiction. It opens with a long lingering shot of Michael Fassbender's lead character Brandon lying naked in bed just covered by a sheet as the beautiful soundtrack motif plays and before he stirs himself to go on the subway into downtown New York to the ad agency he works at while he lusts after a woman on the Subway. He subsequently follows her off the train and then loses her, probably no bad thing.
The film spends lots of time following his objects of lust and showing him wandering around naked and going out for drinks with his total dickhead of a boss who has the worst chat up lines imaginable. This is probably why Brandon ends up picking up the women left in his boss's wake as you only had to seem vaguely normal to succeed after those lines.
His life seems to change when his sister Sissy, played very engagingly by Carey Mulligan, shows up naked in his shower and announces she has come to stay in his small one bedroom apartment. She seems slightly damaged and is working as a singer in a swankily anonymous jazz club where she gets to sing New York New York very slowly in between Chet Baker numbers. Before she takes the dickhead boss back to Brandon's apartment for sex without realising he's married with kids.
Brandon does some things that will anger plenty of women as we watch him pissing at home with the toilet seat down and in almost the next scene he is at work and slopes off to have a wank in the toilets and carefully cleans the toilet seat before he wanks standing up! Now what is that all about?
Now Brandon is obsessed by sex and seems to like call girls and online video sex and the odd one or two off the wrist but isn't all that adventurous as to me if he was really a sex addict and not just a randy man outside a relationship he would be chasing everything he could. We'd see him with diseased meth addicts with no teeth and picking up the mum with three kids and managing to have sex with her with the kids in the other room before falling for the fat wrinkly old granny or going to a fetish club and getting spanked etc etc.
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Instead, Shame hints at some dark past for Brandon and Sissy which may have something to do with them emigrating from Ireland in there teens but the film never lets on. In some ways that leaves a yawning gap as this just becomes more and more eye candy rather than an exploration as to why they are so screwed up. That would have been a better film, at least if you think they are that screwed up in the first place.
The only time he fails to get it up is obviously with the woman who wants him to make love to her rather than just have sex with her. That he is relationship phobic is all too apparent, but we never get to find out why.
The film seems to be trying to show his descent into madness but it is just him taking bigger risks like fingering a woman in a bar while her boyfriend plays pool and (oh what a shock) when he waves his smelly fingers in front of the boyfriend, he gets the bruising he's been cruising for.
While it works as a softcore turn on for voyeurs I left this film with far more questions about it than answers. It's beautifully shot and the soundtrack is really nice but it felt like something was missing.
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author: simonovitch
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