Steve McQueen (2011)

I was pleasantly surprised to get a ticket for Shame at the London Film Festival, excited about going to see it, neurotically anxious that I somehow wouldn’t get there or that I’d go to the wrong cinema or that the ticket wouldn’t be valid.  In fact the only hitch came when, a few minutes in, a big man in a wheelchair parked immediately in front of me and blocked out a portion of the screen.  I obviously couldn’t ask him to move a bit.   The consolation came in the scene in the film in which Carey Mulligan performs ‘New York, New York’ and the camera remains on her for most of the song:  the size of the wheelchair man’s head fitted exactly into the circle of the large microphone Mulligan was singing into.  I don’t think I’ll quickly forget going to see this film – it was a pleasure to be in a big, attentive audience in the Leicester Square Vue and a privilege to watch Michael Fassbender.

Mulligan plays Sissy, the messed-up, self-harming sister of Shame‘s protagonist Brandon (Fassbender).  He works in some high-powered corporate job in Manhattan but spends as much time as possible partaking of sex, of various but uniformly dispassionate kinds.   A prostitute visits him at his apartment, where he also regularly watches porn on his laptop; he has plenty of porn too on his office computer and wanks both at home and in the toilets at work.   Brandon’s apartment is eyecatching thanks to its lack of any vivid colour:  its clean, metallic surfaces are appropriately loveless and the light blue duvet on his bed looks blanched.  (Brandon is rigorously hygienic:  he carefully cleans the toilet seat at work in preparation for masturbation.)    He keeps ignoring the voice messages left on his home phone by his sister but his well-established routine is interrupted when Sissy (who makes some kind of living as a singer though not, we gather, a very lucrative one) fetches up in his apartment, asking to stay for a few days after the break-up of her latest relationship.  Sissy’s reappearance in Brandon’s life throws it out of kilter, and Steve McQueen expresses this in more or less imaginative ways.  Sissy’s personal untidiness symbolises the messiness of feelings for other people.  (Brandon, grudgingly making breakfast for her, snaps at Sissy when she drinks orange juice straight from the carton instead of using a glass.)  On the night she arrives, her brother determinedly ends the evening in the usual way, watching a porn film; but the moans from that merge with an unaccustomed sound.  He listens:  it’s Sissy wailing on the phone to her ex-boyfriend in the next room.

The climax to Shame comes when Brandon – after a short-lived but unnerving liaison with a woman from work, which threatened to get emotional – tells Sissy he wants her out of the apartment.  He goes into the city for a night which includes propositioning a woman in a bar and deliberately provoking her boyfriend into giving him a beating, some hurried gay sex because nothing else is immediately available, then a threesome with two women.  Brandon emerges from the subway into the dawn of the morning after, spooked when his train has to discharge because of some kind of incident that the police are investigating.  He’s seized by an apprehension that something’s happened to Sissy and, sure enough, he returns to the apartment to find that she’s tried bloodily to commit suicide (not for the first time and, as it turns out, again unsuccessfully).   Brandon expresses anguished remorse.  The film ends with him back on a subway train and finding himself looking into the eyes of the same young woman he saw on his way to work at the start of Shame, long ago – before Sissy re-entered his life.  As before, the woman prepares to get off the train.  On their first encounter, Brandon went after her but lost her in the rush hour crowd.  This time he stays in his seat.

With its full frontal nudity, its graphic sex scenes of various kinds, and its provocative theme, Shame may seem daring but I’m not sure how brave it is.  Two bits of dialogue seem to express, respectively, its subversively original potential and its retreat into relative conventionality.   Brandon explains to that woman in the bar why he wants to have sex.  ‘I like the way it feels,’ he says.  ‘I like the fact it’s just me and it’.  Back on the street with his face bleeding after he’s goaded the boyfriend, he picks up a  voice message from Sissy, who tells him, ‘We’re not bad people.  We just come from a bad place’.   Steve McQueen and Abi Morgan, who wrote the screenplay with him, suggest that Brandon’s addiction to sex is the expression of a fear of emotional closeness that’s pathological; they also suggest that he (like Sissy) is somehow ‘damaged’ and that this explains his behaviour, and his screwed-up psyche.  According to the compelling logic of the film, the trauma of Sissy’s renewed suicide attempt should reinforce Brandon’s determination to depersonalise his relationships.  Instead, he goes out into the freezing rain of a cold, bleak New York day and collapses to the ground in tears, as if in admission of how aberrantly he’s chosen to live his life.   If Shame had ended at this point it would have been a serious anti-climax.   McQueen and Morgan do well to include that postscript on the subway train, although Brandon’s deciding not to go after the young woman passenger this time suggests pretty conclusively that he’s a sadder and a wiser man.  Fortunately, Michael Fassbender’s face transforms this final moment into something more ambiguous.  Brandon will stay put today but Fassbender’s eyes suggest an uneasy convalescent rather than a reformed character.

The less than 24-hour relationship between Brandon and the woman he works with – she’s called Marianne – is developed extraordinarily well.   She makes the first move at the office and they go out for dinner; she arrives first, he joins her after thinking at least twice.  The conversation between them in the restaurant is very well written and directed, and brilliantly acted.   Marianne tells Brandon he seems nervous – and he does:  he can’t disguise his liking for her but that makes him apprehensive.  They part very haltingly at a subway station:  Marianne evidently expected the night to go on for longer.  Next morning, Brandon impulsively starts chucking into black rubbish sacks his stash of porn as well as Sissy’s accumulating debris.  He goes to work, finds Marianne, and takes her in his arms; they leave work immediately, book into a hotel room, slowly start making love.   Then Brandon stops:  the more Marianne gets into it, the more warmly passionate she becomes, the more it turns him off.  (Nicole Beharie conveys Marianne’s shocked humiliation, and recovery of dignity, with great delicacy.)  Brandon is appalled by what he’s done but, a few seconds later, is banging (and that does seem the operative word) a different woman in the same hotel room with vigorous, relieved dispassion.

This is challenging material and Steve McQueen is nervous of doing justice to Brandon’s outlook on life.  In the restaurant scene, Marianne explains that she’s recently separated and Brandon says he can’t understand why people get married nowadays anyway.  Marianne finds what he says disturbing but, on the evidence of the characters in Shame, Brandon has a point.  David, his slimy boss, demonstrates that the idea of a happy family life is a hypocritical fiction.  He has a wife and children but he’s clumsily avid for casual sex at every opportunity.  (James Badge Dale is effective, though a little obvious, in the role.)  That young woman on the subway train wears a wedding ring.  Brandon’s asking what’s the point of monogamy when you have access to sexual freedom may be questionable but, with no one around to illustrate the possibility of a happy marriage, he’s hard to argue with.  The absence of fulfilled couples makes very unconvincing McQueen’s vague implication that his main character has got it all wrong.

Michael Fassbender is one of the most lavishly talented actors I think I’ve ever seen:  watching him in this film just a few weeks after his Rochester in Jane Eyre, you think there’s nothing he can’t do.  In sex scenes here, his face holds a combination of agony and ecstasy, expresses a sense of erasing his identity while retaining a streak of objectivity, which is quite extraordinary.  He’s powerfully lupine and can just as easily be quietly courteous – holding open the door of the apartment block for one woman neighbour, his eyes riveted to the receding backside of another.  When he and Marianne leave the restaurant, Brandon is relaxed by the wine inside him and, in the street, asks her to touch the back of his head (to feel an irregularity in his skull, the result of a childhood accident, which sounds worryingly symbolic).  When she does, Fassbender barks as if to bite her:  the moment stands comparison with Brando’s alley cat snarl in A Streetcar Named Desire.   What’s especially brilliant about Fassbender here is that, within a very few minutes of screen time, he’s got across what life is like inside Brandon’s head and made the audience complicit with the character.  But he doesn’t (unlike, say, Colin Firth in A Single Man) go round with a look on his face that signals his psychological state to the outside world.  Brandon stands out from or blends into his surroundings as he sees fit.  (It’s a pity that Steve McQueen directs Lucy Walters, the girl on the subway train, to be a little too responsive to Brandon’s watching her – although the wordless exchanges between them have terrific tension.)

Although his American accent is good enough, Fassbender may not be entirely comfortable with it (I guess this is why we’re told that Brandon’s family emigrated from Ireland when he was a teenager).  Carey Mulligan handles the accent with confidence and a lot of wit; her speaking voice is richer than you might expect from An Education and Never Let Me Go and she’s stunning when she sings ‘New York, New York’ in a bar, to a small audience including Brandon and David.  Mulligan delivers the song in a sweet, clear voice and the distinctive arrangement allows her to express Sissy’s character very convincingly in her singing.  The number starts quietly, almost sinisterly, with a sparse piano accompaniment and in a slower tempo than usual; and that’s the way it stays – it confounds expectations that the voice will eventually be joined and borne aloft by the warmth and amplitude of a band as ‘New York, New York’ hits its self-assertive stride.  Sissy is alone throughout the number.  As his sister starts to sing, Brandon looks apprehensive:  he’s anxious for her to get through it OK but he senses the threat of getting caught up in the performance and, when the camera returns to Fassbender near the end of the song, we see how Sissy’s voice is invading Brandon’s privacy.  After Sissy’s comes off stage to join him and David, Brandon tries to downplay what he felt about her singing.  When David says ‘You made a grown man cry!’, he makes Brandon’s tears something much more conventional and safe than what we just actually experienced.   The three get a cab back to Brandon’s apartment; Sissy and David are heard getting ready for sex by the time Brandon’s through his own front door.   His silent fury is towards his boss taking advantage of his sister and towards her for being a presumptuous guest, and because sex is taking place within earshot and Brandon is excluded from it.   Michael Fassbender can keep a character’s conflicting feelings in balanced tension and let you read them clearly without ever making them obvious.

He can also convey a mood in complete stillness:  there’s more than one shot where the camera is showing Brandon’s back and he’s not moving yet it’s involving to watch.  I don’t understand how this is possible.  Unfortunately, Steve McQueen’s penchant for protracted, attention-compelling two-shots hasn’t left him: there’s nothing quite like the sequence in Hunger (Bobby Sands and the priest facing each other across a table) but a shot in which Brandon and Sissy are sitting close together on a sofa, their faces turned towards each other in taut antagonism, draws attention to itself in a way that’s soon dramatically counterproductive.   The film’s title is offputting (in fact Hunger would have meant more) and much of McQueen’s choice of music is self-importantly solemn too (the original music is by Harry Escott but there’s a lot of Bach).  The film, photographed by Sean Bobbitt, looks very good:  I liked the compositions with a single character at one edge of the frame, as if in opposition to (and overpowered by) the unpopulated remainder of the screen.  There’s not much evidence here, though, that McQueen has a light touch when one is required:  for example, the comical interruptions of an over-attentive waiter (Robert Montano) in the restaurant where Brandon and Marianne meet are a shade too emphatic.

The moment when the subway train that Brandon’s on is halted reminded me of a BBC Play for Today I saw as a teenager – The Circle Line by W Stephen Gilbert.  The disaffected protagonist (played by Michael Feast) is the only person who remains calm when a train stops in the tube for too long (of course I think of the lines in ‘East Coker’ now, though I didn’t know them at the time).  Then the train moves on – normal service is resumed.  Shame might have been more powerful with something similar at its conclusion – something which, instead of his cathartic breakdown, showed Brandon as beyond caring in a more entrenched way than before.  Michael Fassbender could really have made a lot of that:  he can be very cold, and he uses that quality to make Brandon repellent at times.  It’s one of the things that makes his portrait so complete:  you keep changing your mind about how (un)sympathetic Brandon is.  The effect of this is that, at the end of Shame, you feel you’ve been pulled into this man’s life (an effect probably magnified for me by sitting much nearer the front and looking at a bigger screen than I’m used to) – and covered a lot of ground with him.  The limitation of the film is that it’s inclined to see Brandon as a case study; the marvel of Fassbender’s characterisation is that he creates a personality who’s unsettlingly close to normal.  The director has a fascinating subject, which he takes only so far.  His lead actor goes all the way.

15 October 2011