Three different perspectives on Shame

The challenge – for each of us to write a review about the movie “Shame”. So here it is, in consecutive posts, three different perspectives on the new Steve McQueen movie. 

As a journalist, I rarely miss deadlines, a consequence of working under an editor who said this was one word which meant what it implied.

However, this is one deadline I missed. I had been challenged by a friend who, after watching the new Steve McQueen movie “Shame” together in London, said we should each write a review and he set a deadline of a week after.

This was obviously in retaliation because I had dragged him to watch “Shame” when what he wanted was the “Iron Lady”. Sexual addiction as a trade for the life and times of a formidable political leader – obviously a heavy price has to be extracted.

So a month after, I think I am just about ready to write about “Shame”. I wouldn’t put this tardiness down to sheer laziness, mind you.

I think honestly that the movie left such a deep impression in me – there was rarely a moment after I had left the Odeon cinema in Marble Arch that I didn’t think of it – that I felt I had to put some distance between it and me to do it justice.

Steve McQueen’s treatment of sexual addiction in “Shame” is brutally honest yet disturbingly moving.

First, he paints beautiful veneers – the perfect, cultivated life of Brandon (Michael Fassbender) in his beautiful apartment and successful career – then he peels them away, layer by layer, that leaves you squirming in your seat.

It’s like watching your best friend get naked in front of you – you don’t really want to see it because you know once the layers are off, your friendship will never be the same again.

Brandon is a sexual addict. He masturbates everywhere and all the time. He goes to prostitutes. Yet you feel that his actions are more about releasing pain than they are about seeking pleasure. There’s nothing pleasurable about his encounters with prostitutes – it is impersonal yet strangely polite and respectful.

McQueen does the same veneer-peeling trick with his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) who arrives out of the blue to stay with Brandon and, in the process, turns his perfectly-ordered life upside down.

She’s got issues, this one – the scars on her wrist are a tell-tale sign and McQueen captures it in every scene – the moment where she is singing “New York, New York” in a bar where every note is felt, every facial nuance captured, that you know that she is singing it for her and Brandon and the two share a history of pain and need that is driving both of them towards yet apart from each other.

And when she has an affair with Brandon’s married boss and has noisy sex in his apartment, well, that drives Brandon round the bend and he literally goes for a run through the city – one of the most powerful moments in the film where you feel his pain with every pound on the pavement.

I won’t tell you the ending because it’d spoil things for you but “Shame” is a movie you have to watch for yourself to feel it – what addiction of any kind can reduce a man to when the very thing he needs is what he doesn’t.

It’s as much a story about the universal quest for intimacy, and sex with another is possibly the most intimate thing act we can do yet when stripped of all emotion, becomes the most impersonal.

Brandon loves his sister but fears intimacy because he doesn’t want to have to deal with her issues. He’s interested in a work colleague but is awkward in dating and can’t perform with her. The only place where he is in control is in the bathroom or with prostitutes, when sex is the process, not the desire.

It’s like any form of addiction. Take a woman’s quest for perfect beauty. I read in the papers the other day about two women who will not step out of the house unless they look “perfect”. Or gambling addiction, an old evil that’s since raised its ugly head with the opening of two casinos in Singapore, and tales of lost fortunes, wrecked families and destroyed lives.

Thing is, even when it destroys them, an addict cannot stop.

That’s the question you are left with at the end of the movie. Did Brandon stop? Can he?