Shame - Blu-ray Review

Shame is the film that shows you what happens when you don't listen to Tyler Durden's Fight Club mantra. Isolated in a minimalist apartment high above New York, clothed expensively, with an anonymous high-flying job and dry Martini cocktails, Michael Fassbender's Brandon is wasting his life with Ikea catalogues, expensive coffee and lots and lots of pornography.

Steve McQueen's film unravels from here, as does Brandon and sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan). Where the former is as graceful an unfolding of ideas as recent modern cinema has seen, the latter is a gnawing circle of past unspecified abuses, addiction and high falling from New York's lofty perch.

The personal aside for one second, McQueen's film is one that seems to have plenty to say about a city that celluloid normally loves unequivocally. Not this New York. Brandon's negative addictions are intertwined with the grubby city. He gets home from work, having travelled on a graffiti-pocked subway and opens a Brooklyn beer while he watches online porn. McQueen's camera, at the end, sweeps down a rain-soaked dock, hardly the silver tower of the Chrysler building. Sissy sings a mournful version of New York, New York, stripped down of all glamour and glitz. This is a film at least partially about New York's darkness. This is the film of the off-Broadway version of a heralded city that may have seen better, cleaner, days.

But the city is only half of the story. Prowling after a woman on the subway, during the film's excellent opening, Brandon is masculinity run wild and rampant and out of control. Fassbender creates a debonair every-man with very little moral fortitude, his direction guided instead by his libido. Brandon is the anti-Alex Zane, the opposite of miss-dressed youngsters who look like they have emerged from Worzel Gummage's rear end. That's what is so dangerous about him. He is out-of-control masculinity, dressed up as the man you'd introduce to your mother.

So is this film about the death of the yuppie dream, the illusion of greatness New York perpetrates or the fall of masculinity? Arguably all three. McQueen ponders his multiple angles while his camera pans and crafts colour-matched soulful scenes that often hint more than they do. Harry Escott's gorgeous score wraps up the artistic invention in a bow, tying Shame up into a package so neat it fools you into thinking you might be safe in your white-panelled hi-rise bathroom, when in fact you are anything but.