Steve McQueen’s Shame never makes it explicit that its protagonist is suffering from a sex addiction. Unlike the men McQueen and his co-writer, Abi Morgan, interviewed in new York as part of their research, Brandon (Michael Fassbender) has not sought help from a specialist, has not labelled himself an ‘addict’, has not attempted to be ‘cured’. Instead, the film, beginning with a sequence showing the mundanity of his daily conquests, frequent masturbation and use of pornography, asks the question: where does ‘normal’ end and ‘addiction’ begin? What makes Brandon distinct from the rest of us? American cinema frequently uses a routine of sexual encounters and urges as a means to create a portrait of male characters in particular, from American Psycho to The Catcher in the Rye. For these characters, their sex lives form the rhythm of their story, its climaxes and crescendoes. For Brandon, his sex life is his story.
The subtlety with which this subject matter is breached in the film is enormously to its credit. It is easy to imagine a film about sex addiction straying into anecdotal scenes of marriages ruined and embarrassing meetings in sex shops, and I am sure McQueen and Morgan could easily have taken many stories of that nature from their interviews with recovering sex addicts. Instead, Morgan explains in a Q&A following the film, what she took from these meetings was ‘an overwhelming sense of sadness, a shame.’ It was this sadness, instead of any individual story, that she sought to communicate with the script. Shame, in its palette of blues and greys, its occasional flashes of red, communicates an underlying hopelessness felt by all its characters- Brandon’s boss, desperately chatting up women, Brandon’s sister, (excellently portrayed by Carey Mulligan) desperately calling up the men who have left her. Brandon’s addiction seems to be a reaction to this same desperation, but he is, as McQueen puts it, ‘imploding rather than exploding’, using his addiction as part of his self-containment and as a way of finding control.
Fassbender, as Brandon, is excellent in his portrayal of what McQueen calls an ‘everyman’, playing Brandon with enormous restraint. Facial expressions, or even lines, are few- but in the scenes where Brandon breaks out of his self-containment, the results are astonishing. Carey Mulligan as Sissy fizzes in place by contrast, and Mulligan communicates a warmth felt nowhere else in the film’s 100 minutes.
The film could be blamed for being a little too restrained: there is no backstory, the ending is inconclusive, and perhaps the narrative is a little thin- but McQueen and Morgan have succeeded in pitching perfectly the short, thoughtful feature they have produced. McQueen seems to feel very strongly about his subject matter, responding viciously to an audience member’s suggestion that Fassbender might have objected to the many scenes of full-frontal nudity and explicit sex: ‘Any actor who wants an act has a duty to portray reality and I wouldn’t work with them if they refused to do that.’ McQueen seemed, more than anything else, to be objecting to the notion that displaying sex in all its honesty wasn’t ‘normal’, was some kind of transgression. Brandon is not, as McQueen put it, ‘sweaty handed in a raincoat. He is like you or me’, and because this is not a story of a character so different from us there is no easy escape, no easy cure, ‘no War Horse sunset’.
3.5 STARS
