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@MovieJay gets down and dirty in his review of Shame

Not since Last Tango In Paris (1971) has a movie been this frank or this mysterious about sex the way Shame is. While there are many sexual situations here, they're not meant to entertain or to titillate us in what is ultimately a brave, challenging character study filled with sadness.

The first shot is an overhead one of Michael Fassbender lying on his back. At first we wonder if his blank face reflects the malaise of Monday-morning-dread. By the end of the film, we wonder if he isn't quite possibly contemplating suicide.

His character is Brandon, a thirty-something guy who's fit and handsome. He lives in a modern, sterilized-looking condo apartment in Manhattan. He works in a building as antiseptic as the one he lives in, but what his job consists of the movie doesn't say. Why? Because it doesn't really matter to Brandon. He's as disconnected from his job as he is from people. A woman's voice - which he ignores - can be heard on his answering machine in the morning. "Brandon, it's me, pick-up...pick-up".

He goes out after work for drinks with his boss, David (James Badge). Do you suppose Brandon counts him as a friend? David's the guy at the bar who tries too hard with women while Brandon is the smoother, more detached and enigmatic one. Even amongst co-workers, Brandon appears to be a loner. The blond at the bar that David had been drooling over picks up Brandon. The sex they have under what appears to be an overpass is hurried and desperate.

Brandon's life is dominated by the need to fulfill just about every occasion with an orgasm. He masturbates in the shower and then again at the office. He hires prostitutes and engages in sex with random strangers. The orgasms he achieves are not a culmination of good feelings originating from desire and intimacy shared with himself or his partners but more in tune with the French idiom "la petite mort" (a small death), the notion of melancholy or something dying inside after expending his life force. Sex is not a pleasurable past-time to Brandon so much as it is an exercise in plumbing.

Sex addiction is relatively new in the landscape of addictions. The debate rages on: Is there such a thing as sex addiction, or is it a cover for deeper issues? We learn from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that in 1987 they classified sex addiction as a mental disorder, though it is downgraded to the level of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. The manual lists it as a "miscellaneous sexual disorder" marked by "distress about a pattern of repeated sexual relationships involving a succession of lovers who are experienced by the individual only as things to be used."

Indeed, Brandon experiences many women as 'things to be used', but he is also using himself as well as being used. Watch the flirtation on the train carefully. Brandon's gaze is aggressive. He must have her. But that woman is using him. He's a prisoner of his own self-abuse and self-loathing. His sex is joyless. His needs are insatiable. When he wanders into a gay club, we don't sense that Brandon's gay. He's there out of convenience. He's getting his fix.

Complicating his life is the arrival from the west coast of his younger sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan). Her love and her need for him underlines his fear of love and intimacy as well as his fear of being known. Her presence in the movie brings it life and vitality as Sissy wears her heart on her sleeve while Brandon's dreadful existence is marked by his coldness to others and his predictable cycle of sex-binges and subsequent melancholic hangovers. In one of the most heart-wrenching renditions of a Sinatra tune ever committed to film, Sissy delivers "New York, New York" at a gig o ne night, her face filled with as much grief and pain as Brandon's when he is having sex.

Shame is an appropriate title for this movie. Consider the sequence where a co-worker comes onto Brandon as well as their awkward first date. He tells her he doesn't see the point of marriage and that four months was the longest he's been in a committed relationship. Considering the anti-climax of the scenes between the two, Brandon's not a guy who appears to enjoy his singledom or his privacy so much as he uses them as a cover that conceals deep wounds. We sense these hurts shared between himself and Sissy.

Fassbender and his director, Steve McQueen, are now some kind of dynamic duo after they're first art-house hit in Hunger. In both films, McQueen does a great job of removing artificial techniques. In a lesser movie the voice I quoted earlier would have announced "it's me, it's your sister!", but since Shame treats its audience with intelligence, its characters speak and behave the way real people do. Bad movies condescend and judge. They're all too happy to tell us what will happen, what is happening, and what just happened. Good movies suggest and imply. They allow us space for contemplation. They leave us with more questions than answers.

Shame is a great movie for those reasons, and of course, for its courageous performance from Michael Fassbender. Both he and Carey Mulligan are worthy of Oscar nominations.

You'll read and hear about how Shame is a lot like American Psycho without the grizzly murders or comic affectations.

Not so.

They both occupy a cold, drab Manhattan with sterile interiors, but Shame has much more in common with the grief and loneliness of the Marlon Brando character in Last Tango in Paris, the Jack Nicholson character in Mike Nichols' post-Graduate social critique Carnal Knowledge (1971), as well as Neil Labute's In the Company of Men (1997).

 

Shame **** out of 4

Posted

@MovieJay gets down and dirty in his review of Shame

Not since Last Tango In Paris (1971) has a movie been this frank or this mysterious about sex the way Shame is. While there are many sexual situations here, they're not meant to entertain or to titillate us in what is ultimately a brave, challenging character study filled with sadness.

The first shot is an overhead one of Michael Fassbender lying on his back. At first we wonder if his blank face reflects the malaise of Monday-morning-dread. By the end of the film, we wonder if he isn't quite possibly contemplating suicide.

His character is Brandon, a thirty-something guy who's fit and handsome. He lives in a modern, sterilized-looking condo apartment in Manhattan. He works in a building as antiseptic as the one he lives in, but what his job consists of the movie doesn't say. Why? Because it doesn't really matter to Brandon. He's as disconnected from his job as he is from people. A woman's voice - which he ignores - can be heard on his answering machine in the morning. "Brandon, it's me, pick-up...pick-up".

He goes out after work for drinks with his boss, David (James Badge). Do you suppose Brandon counts him as a friend? David's the guy at the bar who tries too hard with women while Brandon is the smoother, more detached and enigmatic one. Even amongst co-workers, Brandon appears to be a loner. The blond at the bar that David had been drooling over picks up Brandon. The sex they have under what appears to be an overpass is hurried and desperate.

Brandon's life is dominated by the need to fulfill just about every occasion with an orgasm. He masturbates in the shower and then again at the office. He hires prostitutes and engages in sex with random strangers. The orgasms he achieves are not a culmination of good feelings originating from desire and intimacy shared with himself or his partners but more in tune with the French idiom "la petite mort" (a small death), the notion of melancholy or something dying inside after expending his life force. Sex is not a pleasurable past-time to Brandon so much as it is an exercise in plumbing.

Sex addiction is relatively new in the landscape of addictions. The debate rages on: Is there such a thing as sex addiction, or is it a cover for deeper issues? We learn from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that in 1987 they classified sex addiction as a mental disorder, though it is downgraded to the level of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. The manual lists it as a "miscellaneous sexual disorder" marked by "distress about a pattern of repeated sexual relationships involving a succession of lovers who are experienced by the individual only as things to be used."

Indeed, Brandon experiences many women as 'things to be used', but he is also using himself as well as being used. Watch the flirtation on the train carefully. Brandon's gaze is aggressive. He must have her. But that woman is using him. He's a prisoner of his own self-abuse and self-loathing. His sex is joyless. His needs are insatiable. When he wanders into a gay club, we don't sense that Brandon's gay. He's there out of convenience. He's getting his fix.

Complicating his life is the arrival from the west coast of his younger sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan). Her love and her need for him underlines his fear of love and intimacy as well as his fear of being known. Her presence in the movie brings it life and vitality as Sissy wears her heart on her sleeve while Brandon's dreadful existence is marked by his coldness to others and his predictable cycle of sex-binges and subsequent melancholic hangovers. In one of the most heart-wrenching renditions of a Sinatra tune ever committed to film, Sissy delivers "New York, New York" at a gig one night, her face filled with as much grief and pain as Brandon's when he is having sex .

Shame is an appropriate title for this movie. Consider the sequence where a co-worker comes onto Brandon as well as their awkward first date. He tells her he doesn't see the point of marriage and that four months was the longest he's been in a committed relationship. Considering the anti-climax of the scenes between the two, Brandon's not a guy who appears to enjoy his singledom or his privacy so much as he uses them as a cover that conceals deep wounds. We sense these hurts shared between himself and Sissy.

Fassbender and his director, Steve McQueen, are now some kind of dynamic duo after they're first art-house hit in Hunger. In both films, McQueen does a great job of removing artificial techniques. In a lesser movie the voice I quoted earlier would have announced "it's me, it's your sister!", but since Shame treats its audience with intelligence, its characters speak and behave the way real people do. Bad movies condescend and judge. They're are all too happy to tell us what will happen, what is happening, and what just happened. Good movies suggest and imply. They allow us space for contemplation. They leave us with more questions than answers.

Shame is a great movie for those reasons, and of course, for its courageous performance from Michael Fassbender. Both he and Carey Mulligan are worthy of Oscar nominations.

You'll read and hear about how Shame is a lot like American Psycho without the grizzly murders or comic affectations.

Not so.

They both occupy a cold, drab Manhattan with sterile interiors, but Shame has much more in common with the grief and loneliness of the Marlon Brando character in Last Tango in Paris, the Jack Nicholson character in Mike Nichols' post-Graduate social critique Carnal Knowledge (1971), as well as Neil Labute's In the Company of Men (1997).

 

Shame **** out of 4

Posted