Shame

Shame
http://www.imdb.com/rg/em_share/rt_ipad/title/tt1723811
It has been a long time since I felt the most appropriate adjective for a film was "powerful". Of late there have been a few that have qualified as intriguing, tense, poetic or evocative, and also quite a lot that I could at best describe as trite, rubbish or simply disappointing but it's been a good long time since there was a "powerful" coming at me off the big screen where I have been riveted from start to finish. This is in many respects a really simple film: there is practically no plot, no special effects, not even that much dialogue. A man lives alone and works in an office. His sister comes to stay, which upsets his usual routines and he starts to unravel. By the end, his life appears to have returned to normal, more or less. That's it. But the performances of the brother and sister by Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan absolutely bowled me over; and, even better, the music is intelligently used in a way that genuinely supports and enhances the narrative.
The siblings, Brandon and Sissy, each have their own type of music. Brandon listens to recordings of Glen Gould playing Bach (you can tell these are the Gould recordings because you can hear the pianist humming faintly in the background in the final track used). Sissy listens to popular music and sings jazz standards in posh bars for a living. This distinction in their musical choices reflects their characters, at least on the surface. Sissy is a free spirit, emotional, extrovert, dressing in brightly coloured, multi-pattern vintage clothing. Brandon is up tight, controlled, orderly. His apartment is tidy to the point of impersonality, decorated in the same muted blues and greys that he also wears. Typically, Hollywood uses a classical versus popular music association to make comments on characters - this is, after all, exactly the same pattern of association as in Stepmom, where lovely, free-spirited and put-upon Julia Roberts listens to popular music and up-tight old meanie Susan Sarandon listens to Rossini, a clear indication that she lacks the emotional authenticity of Julia; but finds her rehabilitation as a character by giving up that awful classical stuff and dancing to retro pop songs with her children. This kind of rather heavy handed use of classical music to suggest that there is some moral flaw in a character is very common, and in fact the first piece of music we hear Brandon listen to is the same Goldberg variation that we see and hear Hannibal Lecter playing at the start of Hannibal. But interestingly, in Shame there is no sense that the music is being used to comment on Brandon's morality - it is simply part of how his and Sissy's almost diametrically opposite natures are articulated, even more surprising given how easy it would be to start making moral judgements about him.
Neither sibling is quite what we might first think. Carefree Sissy is a basket case, insecure, chaotic, needy; Brandon is a sex addict. While Sissy announces her presence in Brandon's apartment by playing a record whose repeated words are "I need your love" (little clue there, obviously), Brandon is unable to connect to anyone on any level other than sex, and this makes his relationship with Sissy highly problematic as she is clearly off limits - although it is never directly broached, there is a tension in their relationship that suggests he is deeply uncomfortable around a woman he cannot have sex with. Underneath their surface differences, the siblings are actually very similar, just dealing with things differently. Sissy writes her vulnerability in large letters, her big musical moment being her rendition, in a bar, of "New York, New York", very slow and sparsely accompanied, leaving her voice fragile, slightly insecure, exposed. Brandon's music also conceals a message about his own vulnerabilities. While the use of Bach articulates the contrast with Sissy, the use of the Gould recordings is also pointed: Gould was notoriously eccentric and found it very difficult to engage with the professional musical world, retiring from performing at the age of 31, and focusing instead on almost obsessive recording and re-recording of Bach's music. These exquisite recordings conceal (barely, thanks to the humming) his social disfunction, working here as a metaphor for the way that Brandon's controlled veneered conceals an obsessive sexual disfunction. Why he is like this is never explored or explained: near the end of the film, Sissy says "we're not bad people, we just come form a bad place", suggesting there may be some trauma from their childhood that has left them this fabulously messed up, but there is no exposition, no explanation, just as the is no moralising. In fact, the work that the other music in the film does is to focus us not on the sexiness of the sex (and Brandon really does have quite a lot of sex in this film, not all of it in person (some online), not all of it successful, and not all of it with women) but on the desperation of it. The music at the start of the film is a slow, sombre piece for string orchestra, very beautiful but saying as clearly as possible that this is not going to be a happy and uplifting film - it scores our first sight of Brandon as he wakes, gets up, goes to work on the subway and very nearly picks up the married woman sitting opposite him. It comes back again at the end of the film as he wanders around the city, picking up a random man and going to the back room of a gay bar with him before visiting two women in their apartment and having prolonged sex with them. It is incredibly graphic but the slow, searingly tragic music takes away any voyeuristic titillation and just makes it all seem utterly desperate,with the sheer beauty of the music lending a kind of poetry to the idea that he is suffering, that there is no pleasure in the sex, only a terrible, driven need that never goes away. By no stretch of the imagination are Brandon and Sissy nice people but by the end of the film, I only felt desperately sorry for them. Film is very good at using music to impose an interpretation of the visual imagenon its audience,and from that point of view this film is no different. But the extent to to which the music works against the obvious meaning in the images and renders Brandon sympathetic rather than simply condemning him, makes for a genuinely powerful film.