Fifty Shades of 'Shame'

So I'm almost, almost done reading the first book in the trilogy of this  Fifty Shades of Grey crap that everyone's been "raving" about and let me tell you, the rumours are true: its god-awful. The first few chapters are pure Danielle Steele and the rest...well it's just a bunch of talk about ass-whippings, erections and nipples half the time. I pity the trees that were sacrificed for the printing of these books. What's even more troubling for me though is how much Fifty Shades reminds me of Shame, a critically lauded art-house film I saw recently.

Directed by Steve McQueen (no relation to the actor, I think), Shame tells the tale of Brandon (Michael Fassbender) who, on the surface, appears to be a nice enough hard-working guy (his job is never really revealed or explained). Behind closed doors, however, Brandon is a hardcore sex addict who will take any opportunity to put his lower body to 'good' use. He is constantly jerking off to Internet porn or hiring prostitutes to get some real vaginal or anal action. It seems to be a perverse enough existence until his wayward sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) shows up and moves in with him. Her arrival (as well as her sexual encounters with his boss) somehow inspire Brandon to attempt to abstain from sex. Yet that proves to be impossible and he starts doing it all over again, even throwing men into the mix near the end of the film (the film shows no signs that he's bisexual, just that he's desperate for sex that he'll have it with anyone or anything). And that's it... well mostly. There is an attempt at developing a narrative around Brandon's relationship with Sissy but it's pretty much lost amidst all the sex.



Like Fifty Shades, Shame really has nothing of importance to say. Just like the novel's infamous Christian Grey, we have no insight into who Brandon is beyond his sex addiction. We just know that (again, like Christian) he constantly walks around with an intense look on his face, constantly on the prowl for someone to fuel his desires. Women are also mostly just there to be played with and then disposed of. It's really just a depressing porn movie. Yet critics (at least the American ones) seem to be lapping it up. The film has a metacritic rating of 72% and Roger Ebert (my favourite US film critic) scored it a perfect 100! Ebert justifies this score by claiming that Shame is a fine feat of acting and filmmaking.

 



Okay so I kind of agree about the acting part. Michael Fassbender is actually pretty damn good in this film. Sure he seems completely tortured throughout the film but at least he's able to show us some glimpse of Brandon's humanity. Also you've got to admire a man who's willing to go commando on camera. Now that must be someone who really will do anything for his craft. Other than that though, there really is not much filmmaking going on there. The sex scenes are at the endless length that the one's in Fifty Shades will probably be when the film produced (yes, there is indeed a film in the works) and even the non-sex scenes are pretty much just long scenes of people hanging around looking desperate. Long scenes of people looking desperate worked in Lost in Translation because the characters were actually interesting, complex and endearing. Here they're pretty unsympathetic and McQueen seems obsessed with exploring how many ways he can degrade them further and further through the long shots of his camera lens.





Besides Fassbender's performance, the only way I can justify critics' interest in Shame is that critics like porn. However this porn is a very different kind to the "mommy porn" that Fifty Shades is acclaimed for. See "critic porn", as Shame demonstrates, requires the film to at least look like its trying to be artsy and pretentious. If you have two solid actors who can look distressed when having sex, then bingo it's no longer a guilty pleasure. If there are long, long scenes which emphasise this distress...well that's even better. See as long as the emotion's there and its unpleasant, critics will hype pretentious porn as a cinematic masterpiece about the desperation of humanity. With some films this is indeed true but certainly not here. Though there isn't much dialogue in Shame, I can almost picture Brandon saying Christian's lame words: "I don't make love, I fuck". Sorry critics, Shame is sadly your Fifty Shades.


Source for Picture 1: http://www.moviemandan.com/2011/12/shame.html

Source for Picture 2: http://youarenotlostyouarehere.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/popcorn-time-movie-review-shame/