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Shame

From the opening shot of director Steve McQueen’s Shame, it’s apparent that each and every moment will be carefully plotted and photographed. Though I haven’t seen McQueen’s previous work, I’m told that 2008’s Hunger is a bit of a masterpiece, and I don’t doubt it. Shame is a brilliant realist film, a meditation on our most personal moments.

Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds) bares all as Brandon, a man living the Patrick Bateman lifestyle — minus the voice over and murder. He "works" in a New York high rise, lives mere blocks from Madison Square Garden in an immaculate, white-washed apartment, watches copious amounts of porn as if it were Seinfeld reruns and has more sex than Peter North. Having trouble maintaining any sort of actual relationship with anyone in his life, Brandon’s routine is focused completely on satisfying his never-ending sexual appetite.

Said routine is drastically interrupted when his singing sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan, who goes full-frontal in this one) appears in his shower and informs him that she needs to crash there for a while. Their relationship is rocky at best, though you can see that they do genuinely love each other. Though it is never explained what their family history is, the audience can slide nicely into their story as it's a familiar one. Many of their interactions are photographed from behind in a single take, giving the audience a truly realistic fly-on-the-wall view of their lives.

Most of the film is shot this way — 10-minute long takes with no cuts, a style re-popularized by young mavericks such as Paul Thomas Anderson — and it works well here. These incredibly personal and

realistic moments — such as an awkward sexual encounter and a date — play out well, and are juxtaposed with chaotically cut fits (the purging of Brandon’s porn, a homo-erotic encounter and even a beautifully lit threesome). Just as Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control was an action film without the action, Shame finds a way to balance the personal moments with the extreme, never boring the viewer.

There are some lighter moments, courtesy of James Badge Dale (The Departed) as Brandon’s womanizing boss — he comes across like Matthew Goode in Match Point, the try-hard comrade to Brandon’s effortless Lothario.

One could easily write Shame off as simply a beautifully shot porn — and, if you take it at face value, it is. But what is presented here is the most intimate film I’ve ever seen. It showcases the moments you never see onscreen (Brandon’s morning routine, including urination, for example) and extends the scenes you often do (a close up of Sissy singing New York, New York in its entirety). Whether we care about Brandon or not is entirely subjective, but his story is so engrossing the viewer simply cannot look away. A lesser writer or filmmaker would have crumbled and given Brandon some sad- sack voiceover, but Shame feels real, whether you identify with Fassbender’s character or not.