start spreading the news.
acclaimed visual artist steve mcqueen’s follow-up to hunger – his bold, bizarrely stylish hunger strike movie from 2008 – is another powerfully evocative single-barreler: shame, the bold, bizarrely stylish plight of sex addict brandon sullivan [the ever-gripping michael fassbender] in the contemporaneous melting pot of manhattan’s urbanite professionals. that this time ‘round mcqueen doesn’t need to resort to attention-grabbing, virtuoso twenty-minute takes or paintings made with shit to turn heads is a testament to both the tenacity and frankness of his cinematic premise. shame has a boldness that emerges from mcqueen tackling full-on the despair bubbling beneath the everyday lives of those who’ve made it. yes, you can be rich, a baller and carry a devastatingly cruel, life-ruining craving for sex.
‘my little town blues/ are melting away’ croons sissy [carey mulligan], brandon’s obnoxious little pad-crasher of a sister in an agonizingly slow rendition of the frank sinatra classic, new york, new york, here stripped of every ounce of its romantic optimism. it’s an all-encompassing sensorial cue to the bigger ideas mcqueen is invested in: a bravura shot-reverse shot laying bare of the private emotional undercurrent this intriguingly strained relationship the brother-sister at the core of the film share: mulligan’s button-cute face trembling with an unspoken, hidden pain; fassbender’s genteel chiseled features cracking as if a repressed memory of a more naïve former version of himself is suddenly unearthed. not even james badge dale (the other other rat that emerged out of nowhere in 2006’s the departed) coming on to sissy in desperation after her performance can comically relieve the cathartic tension of the moment he’s just witnessed. and being that shame occupies those troubling moments with such specificity, it doesn’t always make for easy viewing.
but fassbender (and his fassjohnson) perform literally admirably, trying so hard to emotionally and physically connect with first a co-worker [nicole beharie], then his sister, that at least makes for compelling viewing. never are those personal arcs as easily closed as in the raw release of sex: an enveloping, primal urge that belies brandon’s charming professional façade. darker depths lie beneath the quaint minimalist lines of his cookie-cutter apartment, depths that fassbender plumbs with the acuity that only long-term actor-director partnerships seem able to produce [the venice jury saw fit, too, to award fassbender their best actor prize]. and yet it’s mulligan here that is as we’ve never seen her – not just nude, but bare and dangerous and riveting in variations of her on-screen persona we’ve henceforth hardly been witness to.
few words are spoke in shame, and that few words are ever spoken today is partially the point. sean bobbit and mcqueen’s stark, spartan visual compositions (alongside harry escott’s elevation of the pictures to operatic heights) expose how little words can sometimes say. even so, word of mouth can speak volumes, especially for a such a potentially underseen title as this’ll likely be. start spreading the news – shame is one of the most defiantly resonant films to emerge of 2011’s crop, and undoubtedly one of the best of its year. it starts screening on our shores february 9, but’ll stay with you long after that.
