Shame

Disgusting.

Absolutely disgusting.

Honestly, why do film-makers feel the need to do it?

Nobody wants to see it.

It just makes me so angry.

Anyway, enough about Carey Mulligan...

Actually, no, let's have a little bit more about Carey Mulligan.

What is the point of Carey Mulligan?

We already have Kiera Knightley to be a posh English girl who can't act and who isn't as pretty as people keep telling us she is so why do we need another one?

Possibly Mulligan is styling herself as arthouse Knightley..."An Education", "Drive" and now "Shame" are all fine, fine films (apart from "An Education" which was a steaming turd of a film but one that, like "The Kings Speech", really played well with middle-everything audiences...imagine the Daily Mail rage if "An Education" had been about a comprehensive school, black girl who set off on the same "journey"!) and Mulligan has made very good career choices.

My question is why do fine directors like McQueen and Refn cast her?

She is, at best, a capable performer and I'm sure she is very lovely but she is so far behind her co-stars as to make her performances seem little more than am-dram by comparison.

She is also absolutely incapable of a convincing American accent for any longer than three syllables.

One minute she is John Wayne and the next she is Joan Bakewell.

It's irritating and breaks the connection with the character.

OK.

I think I'm done with the Mulligan rant.

"Shame" is a tremendous film.

However, it is also a tremendously difficult film to watch.

Billed as a film about a sex addict there will, I have no doubt, be packs of young men turning up to see it in the hope that it will be some of multiplex porno...they will leave sorely disappointed because this is a film where sex is mere background to the real pornography of the empty, hollow, unfulfilled nature of modern life.

Opening on a shot of a corpse like Brandon (Fassbender) lying wrapped in blue sheets "Shame" like McQueens previous feature "Hunger" is never anything but beautiful to look at...even when what is happening on screen seems unbearably ugly.  Color, shots, mise-en-scene and costume are all carefully selected and tenderly managed by the director making the experience feel like a walk through a contemporary art gallery.

As Brandon rouses himself from his catatonic state we are confronted with his naked self as he parades around his hipper than hip New York apartment readying himself for a day at work and a night hunting. A voicemail message from a woman begging for Brandon to pick up is dismissed by him and by us as just another notch on his bedpost who has become "needy" or "clingy".

On the tube Brandon fixes an unhappy, beautiful but married young woman with a gaze that leaves her in doubt as to his intentions and desires.  She is interested, flattered but unsure.  She exits the carriage and makes her way through the crowd to street level...evading Brandon who follows her like a shark cutting through the water.  On this occasion he fails to catch his prey but it isn't long before someone else is filling the emptiness of his life.

We learn that the voicemail message has been left by his sister Sissy (Mulligan) who drops into his apartment and into his life and immediately begins to unravel the world that Brandon has constructed.  As they stand on the platform of the underground together we see a loose thread on the shoulder of his jacket...his life, like his jacket, in the early stages of decay.

Sissy sleeps with Brandons boss, Brandon sleeps with some other people, a palpable tension grows and swells between the brother and sister and one cannot help but feel that there is another source of shame other than the one we assume is Brandons own at the nature of his addiction...a love that dare not speak its name may exist between these two and it is that love that has driven Brandon to avoid "relationships" and use sex as a means of control.

This is a film that asks questions and delivers few answers.

"Shame" is an emotion that few of us have a real understanding of...it is more intense than disappointment, more jarring than upset and more devastating than regret.  Shame is the name of the thing that drives people who are empty, who are disgusted with their choices, who are out of control and who don't know where they are going.  It is a powerful and awful thing.

McQueens "Shame" is equally powerful and beautifully, delicately awful in places.