Monday, October 10, 2011

I Wanna Wake Up In That City That Doesn't Sleep

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When Frank Sinatra sang "If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere," you could believe him. New York was a big party and he willing himself to be the life of it, and from there the world. When Sissy (Carey Mulligan) sings the same line not long after she shows up in Shame, stripped and slowed down to a nearly narcoleptic haze, you can almost sense the confetti stopping in mid-air, and now we're walking in between it inside a nowhere time. How we are. And the world has closed in upon us. The streets of Manhattan are haunted, and the view is carved up into squares of fogged-over windowpanes. If the city is a body then this body is half-dreaming, and it is not a happy half. It's restless and depressed, sweaty sheets twisted around its feet. The film opens with Brandon (Michael Fassbender) getting out of bed, and he'll spend a lot of time in various states of waking and unwaking - showering, pissing, getting dressed and getting undressed and watching cartoons and eating breakfast. The times we do see him at work are just as vague and unfocused. The sex Brandon so relentlessly seeks out never seems fulfilling (and it's certainly never erotic) - it slips by like street steam and taxi cabs through night after desolate night.

There's an Edward Hopper quality to the images - rectangular boxes insides rectangular boxes with solitary figures in unfocused light. Brandon's apartment has the indifferent trappings of a bachelor who never turns enough lamps on. There are books on a shelf that you figure he probably read in college and then carried around ever since just so he would have books on his shelves. He doesn't even seem to try hard when it comes to picking up his conquests - looking like Michael Fassbender resolves that problem, naturally - they come to him half the time. Or he pays, or he finds them on the internet - the modern man has more choices than he'll ever need or know what to do with. Which is part of the problem.

Indeed the anonymity of the age we live in today and the way the film tackles that is an aspect of the film that I think those arguing it's just another addiction story we've seen told a hundred times before aren't giving enough due to. There are only so many stories to be told and what makes the retellings unique is who tells them and the time they tell them through, and I can't think of a film that's wormed it's way into the essence of our age's alienation quite so horrifyingly. If this movie were an album I'd say it's OK Computer, so that being my favorite album perhaps this was made for me just a little bit more. Brandon lives in a world that's been built to make his escape - from family, from friends, from relationships - not just possible but stupefyingly simple. He doesn't even need to leave his apartment. Indeed we see Fassbender stuck in a loop early on, or at least we see half of Fassbender stuck in a loop but it's the half who Brandon is - a cock walking from his bed to his shower ignoring the voice on his phone, time and again, and again, slave to the cock's every whim.

Sissy barges in eventually and snaps him out of the routine, but not in the easy way you first expect. Visually you expect a clashing of completely different types, with Sissy done up in bleached hair and wacky vintage colors and patterns while Brandon's palette is always muted and anonymous, but the two end up being much closer than that - not quite identical, but conjoined at least, and in the most private of places you assume. The first thing Sissy manages to do is take over Brandon's own bed for her own rambunctious sexual exploit, elbowing her way with ease right into his territory. Mulligan is so good in such a completely unexpected way - we've never seen this from her before. And whatever these two have been through together - and how glorious that the film doesn't feel the need to spell any of that out - it's made magnets out of them, forever stuck in the same attraction-repulsion.

Meanwhile Michael Fassbender whittles Brandon down to a husk operating on auto-pilot - his smile's half a degree from panic at any given moment, but nobody seems to notice and he's made it easy to ignore. He can't stop the motions, they seem beyond him, and when he's momentarily inspired to try in the second act his words and then his body immediately betray him. If every door is an exit then you end up with only nowhere left to go. You can run from one side of the city to the other and not see a single soul - you can fuck in the sky for all the world to see but a single soul won't see you. Fassbender makes the void swallowing Brandon up a palpable horror, as if your sinking into quicksand just watching him. Brandon's slipping right off the page of his own story, and McQueen frames him like it, often shoved off to the side and marginalized inside his own frame. It takes an actor like Fassbender to make that slide so haunting, and I'm gonna be haunted by Shame for a very long time.
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3 comments:

Simone said...

A beautiful metaphorical review of a film that a select crowd will understand and appreciate.

Chip Chandler said...

Great review. Can't wait for the DVD (because I *know* it's never going to play here). But what's this Sinatra crap? That's Liza with a Z, baby.

MrJeffery said...

nice review! can't wait to see.