Brandon (MichaelFassbender) is handsome, seductive, and successful. His sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) is almost as good looking, and even more explicitly enticing, but nothing testifies to her being as accomplished as her brother despite her claim that she is making a lot of money as a singer. With no place to stay, the rootless and playful figure, who might dress in vintage in an effort to hold on to old times, arrives at her brother's doorstep and convinces him to take her in.

Brandon's life outside work seems designed to keep the present in absolute check. Introduced as a circle it begins in bed and ends in the bathroom, via the answering machine. The bed and the bathroom are crucial spaces in his elegant but sparsely furnished flat. There are no photos, no books, nothing that tells us anything about who he is, except for an LP-player and a laptop that seem to function as lifelines, linking him to his only outlets: classical music, prerecorded and real-time hardcore pornography.
We learn his name, not through his interaction with another person, but through Sissy's persistent voice on his answering machine begging him to pick up the phone: "Brandon, Brandon, Brandon"

While Brandon has decided to not need anyone (again) and is incapable of remaining in an intimate relationship for more than four months, Sissy wallows in her extreme neediness and leaves message after message for men she has slept with, none of whom ever picks up the phone. Sissy is unable to control her emotional hunger, and Brandon cannot stop screwing and masturbating at home, at work, in clubs, with prostitutes or one-night-stands (or rather fifteen-minutes-stands) in hotel rooms or outdoors.

Shame is British director and video-artist Steve McQueen's second feature after his debut film Hunger (2008) about imprisoned Irish activist Bobby Sands, which also stars Fassbender.
For a filmmaker in general, and someone who left a film school because he wasn't allowed to throw a camera up in the air in particular, McQueen is a master of understated yet visually charged filmmaking. He courageously lets scenes linger in ultra-captivating sequences, like the close up on Sissy's face for her entire performance of a slow and heartbreaking version of New York, New York, or the real-time mopping of a prison corridor floor in Hunger.
With the visual artist's preference for showing not telling Steve McQueen is a skillful and evocative director, whose images, just as the saying goes, say more than thousand words. His visual talent does not in any way interfere with his ability to let his characters communicate verbally, often in a surprisingly obtrusive way (like Brandon's equally promiscuous boss's (James Badge Dale) rant about the many variants of porn found on Brandon's harddrive, the awkward waiter (Robert Montano) who keeps interrupting Brandon's and Marianne‘s (Nicole Beharie) efforts to either become close or keep the distance. Hunger features a more than fifteen minutes long uncut discussion between Fassbender's Sands and a prison priest. These scenes are remarkable holders of multiple meanings and messages that one can watch over and over again.

We are all like magnets, McQueen suggests in a radio interview in film critic Elvis Mitchell's show The Treatment. Everything we experience we carry with us and our luggage is bound to appear in our present one way or another. We are not bad people, Sissy says to Brandon, we just come from a bad place. Something has happened to the siblings that had a profound impact on their ability to relate to other human beings without setting themselves up for rejection at the first encounter, either by being inaccessible or too accessible.
The wonderful filmmaker Steve McQueen, with the help of his brilliant lead actors, is not trying to find out what happened, nor is he eager to see the pair resolve their issues. He is simply, like Brandon and Sissy themselves, interested in isolating a particular period of time and explore how they live with their trauma.

Katarina Hedrén

Review first published on Katarina's blog (In the Words of Katarina).