david hare wrote:YES IT IS!!!
It's one of the big BIG moments of complete Homophobia in the last twenty years. And the absolute worst. The whole movie is a piece of arthouse shit. But the screamingly obvious homophobia is only the beginning - as they say.
THe basic fact is this.
MCQueen is a STUPID STUPID MAN who doesn't have a clue how to direct a movie. SO - he says - let's do THIS (gay bar) scene with no shading whatsoever, and leave it all up to the audience to do - uhh - dah shading. Duh. It's meaningful. Duh.
No more politesse from me kiddo.
Here's an example - really simple FILMschool 101 (Ive never been BTW)
If McQueen wanted to show the gay bar scene as "neutral" at least in terms of the actor and context, if not the already totally phony "Morality" he's set up why doesnt he show the actor actually engaging and responding within that context, with things like body language, expression, or indeed with mise en scene - which is I am sure a term which MCqueen is deeply unaware, and incapable of using or expressing. You get better mise en scene these days from a fucking Doctor WHO Vid from the 90s.
THis could have been a useful if not agreeable movie But it is a wreck totally by confirming every suspicion I had from the first moments of its shabby shallow cheap provencance: how much McQueen and the whole picture stinks of toxic bourgeois Neocon anti sex Control freakery.
I have to agree with David on this one. I watched this last night and let it sink in today before posting, but seeing this thread 24 hours later I'm glad to see I am not alone in my initial perceptions. Overall, the film suffers from the same malady Hunger did: all style w/ very little substance. McQueen is clearly very talented with a camera, but he seems incapable of creating cinema that conveys any sense of character beyond rudimentary categories. He throws us a bone with one of Sissy's voicemails where she says "we're not bad people, we just come from a bad place" - but that is it in terms of context for Brandon and his sister. we have no idea why both of them are so fucked up. and frankly, we don't even really get much beyond snapshots of how exactly Brandon is screwed up. He stares a lot, has a nice dick, and clearly has intimacy issues, but so what? What in this film provides any thread to grab onto that makes me care? It is mindbogglingly superficial for all its pretension to profundity.
As for the gay scene, if it's really meant to be just another aspect of his addiction, then why does the gay bar have to be this bizarre 1980s den of iniquity with men writhing in dirty plywood cubicles between plastic sheeting? Why are all of the other scenes in his chic apartment, or upscale restaurant bars? Where, I might add, all he has to do is sit there broodingly, refuse to dance with a woman, let his boss make an ass of himself, and then get picked up walking home by the hot blonde who he can then fuck in a viaduct. Skills. Even the prostitutes come to him, or he visits their swinging, clean, upscale pads. The only "depravity" in the film is that single moment, which is made as dirty as it could possibly be in order to convey just how low he's fallen. I can not possibly imagine how he could have made that scene more insulting to an entire class of people. If he were making a movie about a bulimic, the only analogy that fits would be that the otherwise upscale white collar victim hit such a bottom that he ended up in the ghetto at a 24 hour chicken and waffles joint and asked for sweet tea and watermelon for dessert - all while refusing to look any black patrons in the eye because, as we all know, they're depraved people who really eat that crap!
The one moment that drew me in hopefully - where I thought we might actually be getting somewhere - is with the coworker. The date scene was well done, the other scene with her really starts to hit home, and then nothing. we never see her again. It's like McQueen was afraid to broach the feelings Brandon is clearly trying to subsume within his sex life. Instead of moving the narrative forward, all we get is Fassbender staring intently some more. There could and should have been repercussions at work (which he seems to simply cease going to altogether) that might give us some sense of the spiral we are supposed to believe he's in, but because there aren't how do we know this isn't just another week in his sad life? There are NO CONSEQUENCES to his actions. none. his boss blames porn on his computer on an intern and then he never goes back to work. that's a nice job.
And finally, I had heard how impressive the NY NY scene was in the posh club and was flabbergasted at how bad it was as I watched. I actually rewound to see what I was missing...but nope, it's nothing but a terrible rendition of a classic song with more intent staring and a hint of a tear for Brandon. a tear that of course leads us nowhere because McQueen refuses to actually reveal anything about these people. So all we're left with is a remarkably brave performance by Fassbender - who again proves he has skyrocketed to the top of his profession - that is impressive to watch (even if the intent staring gets a bit tiresome) and I forgave the final breakdown in the rain since that's clearly not his fault. He executed it as well as one could hope such a cliche could be executed. But that coupled with Sissy's actions pushed the film into laughable indulgence in the end, made all the more insipid by the blatant homophobia of his "OD", to quote mr. McQueen.
This is now two films I was incredibly excited for that I have found lacking in every way. I don't know what i seem to be missing, but so far my only impression of McQueen as a filmmaker is a man with the chops to frame pretty pictures hampered by an almost total inability to actually direct a competent FILM. He's an impressive visual artist, but I just don't think cinema is his medium. And I hate that he's made me agree with people like Lisa Schwarzbaum ("The biggest surprise in
Shame is how distanced, passionless, and merely skin-deep the director's attention is - how little he cares about the subject of his own movie."). Slate's 2011 year-in-review blurb summed up things nicely in my opinion:
Shame, which feels fraudulent in every way, from its gleaming surfaces to its laughably overblown soundtrack to the perfect teardrop rolling over Michael Fassbender’s perfect cheekbone in that perfect lounge where, in real life, no one would ever let Carey Mulligan sing a shoe-gaze “New York, New York.” Oh and what about the scene where he jogs to classical music? Or the part where his addiction drags him so deep into hell that he (gasp) gets a blowjob from a dude in a dimly-lit sex club? (As the writer Bryan Safi noted on Twitter, “I'd love to see a movie where a strung-out gay guy sinks so low and degrades himself so much for his addiction, he hooks up with a woman.”)
This is a dismal failure made all the worse by its insulting ant-gay sentiments and reliance on rudimentary people-in-despair cliches that doesn't even have the courtesy to provide anything remotely close to actual three dimensional people in its "story."
