Shame
Directed By:
Steve McQueen
Written By:
Abi Morgan and Steve McQueen
Starring:
Michael Fassbender, Carey Muligan, James Badge Dale, Nicole Beharie, and Lucy
Walters.
Director of
Photography: Sean Bobbitt, Editor: Joe Walker, Production Designer: Judy Becker,
Original Music: Harry Escott
Rated: NC-17
for graphic sexual content and Michael Fassbender’s Fass-member.
Shame, the second feature from British artist Steve McQueen, opens on a
shot from top down on its main character, Brandon, sprawled naked across his
bed. But he only takes up half the frame, the other half highlighting his empty
grayish blue sheets. The painterly quality of this image is of course no
surprise to those who know Mr. McQueen, a conceptual artist that has only
recently moved into filmmaking. But it also highlights the emptiness that
surrounds Brandon; in a world where he can have anything, still finds himself
longing for something, anything, to fill the void of his life.
Mr. McQueen’s first film, Hunger, was an audaciously bold and
formalistically polarizing debut that followed the British IRA hunger strikes
in the late 1970s. Mr. McQueen, uninterested in politics, focused on the
control and degradation of the body, and the mental power to command such an organism.
It was also the first film to introduce us to Michael Fassbender, who went on
to starring roles in Fish Tank, Jane Eyre, A Dangerous Method,
and now plays Brandon in Shame. And if Hunger was about the
complete control of the body, Shame is about a body that constantly
feeds in order to keep the mental state from absolute disaster.
