Shame and Sleeping Beauty
By
Anthony Lane
The New Yorker, December 5, 2011
Edited by Andy Ross
Shame
hero Brandon (Michael Fassbender), has an office job in New York. The
director, Steve McQueen, is a Brit who is drawn to extreme behavior in his
characters because he wants to unleash the wildest material that he and his
camera can possess and tame.
What propels Brandon is sex. He lives
alone, and a quiet night in means hiring a prostitute or hooking up to a
remote mate for a video chat. At work, his hard drive is rancid with
downloaded filth. His boss David (James Badge Dale) tries to ensnare a
blonde at the bar, but it is Brandon whom she fucks later that night.
The result is pure and pitiless. No viewer could be harsher on the
uncontrollable Brandon than the director is. At no point is the philanderer
permitted to look as if he might be enjoying himself. In one tidal wave of a
night, he comes on to a woman in a bar, gets hoofed in the face by her
boyfriend, swings by a gay club for a brief encounter (any port in a storm),
and then rounds off the evening with a nice warm threesome. His companions,
in that climactic bout, are played by DeeDee Luxe and Calamity Chang.
Shame
compels attention. Amid its pious devotion to the woebegone, there are
scenes that hit a nerve. The wordless subway ride that finds Brandon sitting
opposite a young woman is perfect, and if McQueen had stopped there it would
have been a poem. Instead, there is a lot of grinding still to come.
Sleeping
Beauty, by Australian director Julia Leigh, tells the tale of Lucy
(Emily Browning), a student famished for cash. Usually, she turns tricks to
boost her income, picking up men in a bar as if they were litter, but she
soon enrolls in an escort service. Her duties include waitressing, half
nude, at dinners arranged by an exclusive club, and later, for a larger fee,
taking a sleeping draught and submitting to the attentions of old white men.
Sleeping
Beauty deconstructs the libido as a weapon in the armory of patriarchal
oppression, and the voyeurs who prey upon Lucy are repugnant to observe. The
movie lingers in the mind because of Emily Browning.
The Sunday Times, January 8, 2012
Edited by Andy Ross
Steve McQueen: "If you want to do it — do it. I did it." His 2008 debut
movie was
Hunger, about the IRA man Bobby Sands. His new movie is Shame,
the first film to take sex addiction seriously. McQueen: "Catholicism,
Islam, Judaism, whatever, they all have this sense of what's right and
what's wrong ... it's just a kind of universal acknowledgment of shame or of
being good or bad." Shame
deals with guilt and shame without religion. McQueen: "I just do stuff ... I
try to make shit happen."
Sleeping Beauty
By Dan Kois
Slate, December 2, 2011
Edited by Andy Ross
Sleeping
Beauty, director Julia Leigh's assured debut, includes four moments
where Lucy (Emily Browning) lets her impassive facade crack: a late-night
swim, an embrace with a dying friend, a bikini wax, and an awakening to a
kiss. For the rest of the film, Lucy reveals nothing except for her skin.
But Leigh is going after something weirder than titillation.
Sleeping
Beauty is about power and control. Lucy's lack of money requires her to
relinquish control again and again. Lucy answers a want ad, in search of
easy cash. A sophisticated madam named Clara (Rachael Blake) employs her to
enact the fairy tale of the film's title. Lucy drinks a powerful sleeping
draught and lies nude and unconscious in a luxurious bed, while Clara's
clients pay for the privilege of doing anything they want to her short of
intercourse.
Sleeping
Beauty is hard to watch at times. The scenes of a sleeping Lucy can be
as scary as in a horror movie. But the pace is stately and deliberate. Leigh
shoots long scenes in a single take, the camera panning back and forth
slowly, watching the action. Lucy is framed so carefully that the movie
edges into portraiture. Those four moments of real emotion wake us up.
