14
Oct
The first official trailer for the film festival sensation Shame, directed by Steve McQueen (Hunger) and starring Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan. I saw this with Tamie at the Mill Valley Film Festival last night, which was the first time I’ve ever actually wanted to a see a movie so badly that I traveled to Mill Valley. The buzz about Shame since its festival premiere about a month ago had given me such an intense desire to see it, I was actually having nightmares where I was finally about to watch it but would suddenly go hysterically blind or something.
Granted, a lot of the buzz about the film had been about its more prurient details: Fassbender stars as Brandon, a character described by many film critics as a “sex addict.” The film developed an overnight notoriety based on buzz about its graphic sex scenes and the full-frontal nudity of its two stars (Mulligan plays Sissy, Brandon’s damaged and fragile younger sister). Those who’d seen the film were only too happy to catalog its many sexual combinations in their reviews, so I’d come to expect a film that was basically nothing but fucking from beginning to end. And being only human, my curiosity to witness the Assbender (a fitting name now that I’ve seen it) in all its glory was enough to…well, go all the way to Mill Valley to see it.
This won’t be a full review, which I’ll save for the film’s theatrical release (it is currently scheduled to release in NY/LA on 12/2 and SF on 12/9). But I would like to temper the buzz about the movie’s sexual content a bit, if I may, just to spare others like myself the mild disappointment I felt while watching the film. While the film does have some explicit sexual content, most of it gets spent during a particularly long night for Brandon toward the end of the film. Up until that point, his “addiction” mostly occurs off-screen, with the audience put in the position of picking up hints and making sense of what is going unseen. And while there is one remarkably gratuitous sequence of Fassbender nudity toward the beginning of the film, it mostly stops after that. Similarly, Mulligan has one (non-sexual) nude scene when her character is first introduced. With all that said, the film is still guaranteed an NC-17 rating.
So that’s all I want to say about Shame for now. It is a very good and remarkably artful film, and I’m still working out my response to it; I look forward to seeing it a second time before its release so that I can focus more on engaging it as a film rather than eagerly awaiting the next naughty bit.
