Opening shot

This is one of the few movies I’ve seen in recent months which inspired me even as I was watching it. I’ve written a couple of novels about individuals and their sexual obsessions, so I was first and foremost drawn to the film by its subject matter – it promised to be not only a visual treat given the reviews I’d read of “Hunger “ but also a ‘conversation’ I could engage in as a writer who likes to work with similar characters and situations.

Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, an Irish émigré, inhabiting a minimalist apartment in Manhattan, which mirrors the lack of emotional warmth in his life. He likes having sex with call girls, he masturbates at least twice a day (in the shower and at work), and he watches heaps of porn on his and his employer’s computer. (Incidentally I’m surprised the writers naively supposed Brandon would be allowed to watch porn at work in a Manhattan office – it’s been years since IT managers shut down all access to all manner of porn on company computers). He doesn’t seem to enjoy himself much with any of this sexual gratification – it’s more like he’s relieving some deeply pent up anguish. The sex is just a release, a habit, a compulsion without end. A dirty smoker’s habit. So yes, he’s not just another lonely guy, he’s a sex addict.

One day Brandon comes home to hear that someone is in his flat. He picks up a bassball bat and advances on the intruder – only to find his wayward sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan) taking a shower in his bathroom. He’s not happy to see her. In fact he’s been ignoring her calls for several days, hoping she would just disappear again. She begs him to let her stay for a while. Her husband or boyfriend is behaving cruelly toward her. But hell, is she needy! No wonder he doesn’t want her around.

When a pretty office worker (Nicole Beharie) shows interest in Brandon, he goes on a date with her. This dinner date is one of my favourite scenes in the movie and one of the few with sustained dialogue that reveals Brandon as more than a sex machine. He is both charming and gauche and appears to have lost all interest in the kind of conversation a woman expects of a man on a first date. After five minutes he blurts out that he thinks relationships are more or less pointless. When his date asks him, “So what is all this, what are we doing here?” he only just managed to pull the date from the brink. A day or so later he rushes into the office, takes the woman by the arm and kisses her in an unoccupied room before whisking her away to a hotel.

When they start to get it on in the expensive hotel room, Brandon can’t get it up. Almost certainly because he can’t handle emotion together with sensation – he’s only used to feeling the latter. The very next shot following his date’s departure, we see Brandon fucking an escort against the hotel window, giving passers-by more than they bargained for on their way back to the office.

Meantime, Brandon grows ever more resentful of his sister’s presence in his flat, which is not helped by her taking his boss to bed one night. Whereas he is cold and controlled, she is highly emotional and given to depressive acting out – and the combination of the two in one apartment is driving both toward self-destruction.

But McQueen and his co-writer, Abi Morgan, deny us any meaningful background detail on Brandon. The same approach was used in “Let’s Talk About Kevin”, which was adapted from a novel stuffed with factual detail but desperately absent of any convincing analysis as to what drove the main protagonist to behave as he did. Presumably the Shame screenwriters regarded background detail as mere exposition, stuff that would ‘slow the story down’ – but in providing us with almost no kind of exposition they make us voyeurs. This unwillingness to peel away layers renders the experience similar to being at an art exhibition – we have to create the narrative for the pictures, bringing our own references to them. McQueen’s own background is in art, so perhaps this explains his preferred way of exploring a visual narrative. I’m afraid I want more. If I’m not feeling much – and learning less – you could argue there’s really not much meaningful drama going on.

Shame deals with the kind of anguish that comes from excessive sexual gratification without emotional connection. About half way through the film, as we watch Brandon’s resentment, his fear even of his sister’s cloying presence in his life, we gather a sense that his behaviour is perhaps the result of some kind of childhood trauma. Was he abused at school, at home? Did he end up having sex with his sister in his teens?

Too many questions hang in the air for a work that demands over 100 minutes of anyone’s time. Has pornography destroyed Brandon’s ability to share feelings, or did something happen to make him ‘addicted’ to pornography? Why is his relationship with his sister so fraught? Except for her history of suicide attempts, we have no idea, we can only guess. Toward the end of the film Brandon ends up in a gay club, seeking a blow-job. Is he a repressed homosexual, or is this just his way of expressing anger at what he’s becoming?

In spite of his increasingly self-destructive behaviour, you grow to like Brandon more and more during the film because you see, underneath it all, a man who wants to care and who still might learn to care. And it’s this wanting to care ingredient that makes Fassbender’s performance so utterly riveting. Ultimately, though, he is so thinly drawn that his behaviour begins to fill us with emptiness, a sediment of boredom.

Shame’s theme is very now, it seems about to invite debate on sexual addiction, but offering so little in the way of insight into its two main characters, it left me feeling inspired as a writer, yet strangely short-changed for lack of answers.

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