SHAME

The Naked Truth

Directed by Steve McQueen
Starring Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, Nicole Beharie

Michael Fassbender’s pretty much the most interesting actor currently working, as the quality of the filmmakers keen to work with him can attest to. Over the past few years he’s worked with Quentin Tarantino, Matthew Vaughn, David Cronenberg, Steven Soderbergh and Ridley Scott, but it’s artist and director Steve McQueen who knows best how to utilise his magnetism and fearlessness, as demonstrated first in the confronting Hunger, and now in Shame.

Fassbender is Brandon Sullivan, a successful, handsome, New Yorker who spends every waking moment in pursuit of sex, be it with casual hookups, paid professionals, or simple self-pleasuring. McQueen frames Brandon’s addiction as just that, eschewing any cheap humour - this is clearly a man on the down slope. His spiral towards self destruction is only hastened by the sudden arrival of his sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), and it soon becomes clear that some unidentified trauma looms large in the pair’s shared childhood.

McQueen’s film focuses much more on character than plot, so anyone expecting resolution from this elliptical portrait is out of luck. But then, the real joy - if such a word can be used in this context - is in the way McQueen and Fassbender elide away the character’s protective layers, uncovering a deep well of pain within. Fassbender’s performance is both deliberate and raw, an immeasurably brave portrayal of man literally trying - and failing - to fuck the pain away.

It almost goes without saying that there’s plenty of flesh on display, but McQueen’s astute camerawork imbues the piece with such a callous and grimy texture that no titillation can be gleaned from the viewing. Sex here is a dirty, desperate, humiliating experience, a cross to bear rather than a state of grace. Brandon is a junkie looking for a fix, and every time the high is less satisfying, the respite from the jones shorter, the downward spiral tighter.

The sense of inevitable, ever-encroaching doom is almost unbearable. From the outset, it’s clear that a happy ending - pun intended - does not lie in Brandon’s future. A tentative, nascent relationship with Samantha (Nicole Beharie), a co-worker, seems to offer some thin hope of redemption, but that is soon dashed - this is a man who cannot allow any real emotional connection in his life, who has retreated into the sensual to get away from his own psychological pain. The very idea of a normal, functional relationship is abhorrent to him, and watching Brandon plunge back into the fleshpots of New York after failing to connect with Samantha is the very definition of heartbreaking.

Shame is by no means an enjoyable film in the strictest sense of the word, but it is an immensely rewarding one. Intellectually rigorous, emotionally uncompromising, and unforgiving in its implications and conclusions, it demonstrates that the searing Hunger was no fluke, and that Steve McQueen is without a doubt a filmmaker of the highest calibre. Recommended.

_TRAVIS JOHNSON