Review: Shame (18)

IF TURNER Prize-winning artist-turned-director Steve McQueen’s second feature was projected onto a gallery wall, the polite, explanatory card posted just off to the side might mention that it’s a work that aims to confront the spiritual malaise of corporate America through the use of space. It might also suggest that McQueen’s juxtaposition of diametrically opposed characters reflects the impossibility of forming genuine connections in a solipsistic world where everything is there for the taking. And if it was being particularly highbrow it might even wax lyrical about how, in an irreligious age, physical debasement is modern man’s equivalent of absolving himself of past sins too difficult to confront directly. Casual viewers staring intently at the image of a well-hung man wandering around a New York apartment in his birthday suit, however, might find themselves wondering instead if what’s on screen isn’t just an unintentionally symbolic riff on the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Shame certainly inspires that kind of scepticism. Beautifully filmed, meticulously composed and intensely acted, it demands to be taken seriously as a work of cinematic art, yet doing anything more than blithely accepting the film on this level makes it impossible to ignore how conventional, derivative and simplistic it is. Its supposedly taboo subject, sex addiction, for instance, is taboo only in as much as it’s the one form of compulsive behaviour that’s still difficult to romanticise on screen – though even that’s not strictly true. Ever since Marlon Brando lubed up with a knob of butter in Last Tango in Paris 40 years ago, making films with serious actors playing characters who engage in joyless sex has become a surefire way for directors to not only have an impact, but have instant credibility conferred upon them.

Never mind that said character flaw has become so over-used in world cinema that any actor cast in such a role might as well have the words “EMOTIONALLY CONSTIPATED” tattooed on their buttocks. The illusion of daring and edginess that the cold, artful treatment of sex provides is, apparently, still enough to fool people into thinking it makes for profound cinema.

Shame’s lack of profundity is at least masked for a while by Michael Fassbender, who manages the herculean task of making his character seem some way believable – despite the way McQueen and co-writer Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady) seem intent on drowning him in clichés.

He plays Brandon, a sex-addicted corporate drone whose only relief from the drudgery of his meaningless, well-remunerated existence appears to be the brief orgasmic highs he gets from a myriad of no-strings sexual encounters: with strangers and prostitutes; with fantasy girls in online webcam sessions – and with himself in his many onanistic bathroom breaks and shower sessions.

Needless to say, Brandon’s the kind of guy who doesn’t see the point in marriage or relationships. Indeed, despite his voracious sexual appetite, he can’t actually perform when there’s any possibility of intimacy – something the film makes painfully clear in a scene that ends with him experiencing erectile dysfunction while on a spontaneous date with an attractive colleague. That the predictability of this scene is matched only by its clunkiness is a sign of how lacking in inspiration McQueen really is, particularly when he follows through by showing Brandon engaging in another quick, loveless session with a call girl in the same hotel room a short while later.

The source of Brandon’s condition, though, may be his needy younger sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan). Unlike Brandon, she’s a narcissistic basket-case who externalizes her unhappiness by baring the scars of a teenage suicide attempt for all to see, bawling her eyes out at any opportunity and wilfully disrupting her brother’s routine when she arrives uninvited to stay in his fastidiously ordered apartment (which, in lieu of any more meaningful character development, is clearly supposed to suffice as a way of explaining Brandon).

Like Fassbender, Mulligan does well here to inject some life into such a clichéd construct, even during a slightly cringeworthy scene in which McQueen has her deliver a melancholic, off-kilter version of New York, New York in front of a tearful Fassbender. Later, Sissy tells Brandon, “We’re not bad people, we just come from a bad place,” which is the closest the film comes to subtlety, not least because both actors manage to convey a lifetime of hurt in their eyes as the scene plays out. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t last, largely because McQueen decides he needs to serve up some bogus dramatic catharsis. Thus, even though he displayed no such truck with convention in his debut film Hunger, he has Brandon descend into a nightlong hell of dangerous sex, attempted suicide and family reconciliation before copping out with an ambiguous ending that raises more questions than it answers. Sadly, the biggest one remains, “So what?”

RATING: **