New York City

Shame (2011)

André Crous

Steve McQueen’s second film is all about one man’s sexual desire and what he does to get what he craves.

shame-mcqueenUK/USA
3*

Director:
Steve McQueen
Screenwriters:
Steve McQueen
Abi Morgan
Director of Photography:
Sean Bobbitt

Running time: 100 minutes

He looks them up and down, everywhere he goes: women, men, couples – they all find him seductive. He goes after them, and he gets what he wants, every time.

Shame is the story of Brandon Sullivan, a young executive who is the poster boy for unapologetic hedonism until he is confronted with the more serious demands of intimacy from two women in his life: his sister and a co-worker looking for more than a fling.

In one of the first scenes of the film, Sullivan watches a young woman sitting opposite him on the New York subway. She returns his gaze, clearly enjoying the attention, though trying to hide her excitement in this public space. At the next stop, she gets up and grabs onto the pole next to him: She is wearing a wedding ring. But he doesn’t relent and instead pursues her down the tunnels of the underground.

Brandon is physically in very good shape, clean-cut and well-coiffed and has a good job downtown and an apartment near Gramercy Park in Manhattan, but the ever-present windows and glass dividers separate him from the rest of civilization. He is used to being in charge of his life, and especially his sex life: He prefers to pay for sex in his own apartment or seek it out in public spaces, where people can be easily discarded but never permits a greater measure of intimacy. When he is not out in bars looking for fun, he sits in his spotless apartment and masturbates in front of his computer screen. He is young and enjoys one-night stands and the general remoteness of his sex partners, sometimes a world away in front of a webcam.

He is forward without being aggressive and plays off his good looks and charm; he knows how to speak to a woman, and almost always he benefits from a comparison with his womanising boss, David. David compliments himself as a way to pick up girls, while Brandon compliments the girls themselves and is much more successful than his pal, even when David is the one doling out one pickup line after another.

Brandon’s bachelor lifestyle is upended, however, when his drama-queen sister, Sissy, arrives to stay with him for a few nights. Not only does she invade his privacy and walk in on him while he’s polishing his family jewels in the bathroom, but she represents a genuine attack on his licentious way of living. The very first evening at his place, she spends hours crying on the phone while she speaks to her boyfriend, telling him how much she loves him. It goes without saying this is the kind of debasement of which Brandon would never allow himself to be a victim.

The relationship between Brandon and his needy sister is evidently a toxic one, and there are hints of a traumatic childhood that are never elaborated on. The tension between them is made all the more agonising by the use of very long takes, one of director Steve McQueen’s trademarks. We know this situation won’t end well, but until the end we have no idea where all of this is headed.

One reason for our disorientation is the structure of the film. At various intervals, McQueen expertly weaves together two, sometimes three different storylines and timeframes to create a mystery guided by our impressions. These obscurities are sometimes quickly resolved and add another level of slight discomfort to the proceedings on-screen.

Shame is McQueen’s second feature film, and while it is in many respects more conventional than his début masterpiece, Hunger, in which Michael Fassbender (who plays the lead in Shame) starred as the Irish republican Bobby Sands, the director doesn’t nail the material the way one would have expected. Technically, the film is beyond reproach, but unlike Hunger, which is set almost entirely inside the Maze prison outside Belfast, the technical aspects of Shame do not engender an experience capable of encompassing an equally flaccid narrative, this time set all over New York City.

There are moments of cinematic grandeur, but the film is also the victim of the director’s fear of explaining too much, and, in the end, too much is left unsaid and unshown. That is a real shame.

Margaret (2011)

André Crous

Superlative performances make Margaret, director Kenneth Longeran’s gloomy comeback released more than half a decade after shooting, a charm.

MargaretUSA
3.5*

Director:
Kenneth Lonergan
Screenwriter:
Kenneth Lonergan
Director of Photography:
Ryszard Lenczewski

Running time: 150 minutes

By the time Margaret was finally released, it had aged so much it had probably passed its expiration date already.

Shot in 2005, it took a full six years before this film saw the light of day and was finally released for distribution. One of the main reasons for the delay was director Kenneth Lonergan’s insistence on a three-hour running time. Given enormous opposition on the part of the distributors, Lonergan eventually relented, and in the end, his film is 150 minutes long.

Two and a half hours is an ambitious length for a film whose plot can easily be summarised, and although the film evinces much of Lonergan’s skill as a storyteller, it doesn’t do him justice as a filmmaker. One of the best films of the first decade of the 21st century was his début feature, You Can Count On Me, a masterpiece of contemporary cinema that has a small story about infidelity and sibling rivalry and first made critics sit up and notice Mark Ruffalo.

Ruffalo makes a return in Margaret, though his brief presence is a great disappointment: He plays a significant role in the development of the film and yet he appears only in two short scenes — both in which, it must be said, he delivers a performance worthy of enormous praise.

Taking its title from the eponymous poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that speaks of grief and a child’s response to the concept of death as it is represented by dead leaves, an emotional reaction as strong as an adult’s reaction to the death of a friend, or of oneself. The poem is very appropriate, as it encapsulates the essence of the film’s plot very accurately.

Lisa (Anna Paquin) is a sharp-tongued teenager living with her mother and younger brother in the Upper West Side in New York City. She will soon join her absent father (played by Lonergan) on a trip to New Mexico and decides to try to find a cowboy hat somewhere in upper Manhattan. She fails, until she notices a bus driver wearing one on the job. She runs after the bus, waving to get the driver’s attention, but the driver only waves back, and not paying attention, he runs a red light and crushes a woman pushing a shopping cart over the road.

When the police ask Lisa whether the light was red at the time of the accident, she looks over at the bus driver (Ruffalo) and when he looks back, she takes it as a sign there is silent complicity between them, and she decides to protect him by saying the light was green. But she is deeply affected by the woman who was run over, a woman who slipped the surly bonds of Earth while lying in Lisa’s arms, and she tracks down the woman’s family.

But Lisa is a piece of work. She is a bit of a stereotypical teenage girl, with all the drama and snotty retorts to her mother that go along with it, and she always tries to ensure she has the upper hand in conversations, even if that upper hand is (usually) gained with sarcasm. She is immature even as she verbally abuses and bullies many people around her, breaking hearts and testing their good will towards her. Over the course of the film, she steamrolls many men in her life, and many women, including her mother, are also terribly hurt. The film is a good companion piece to Noah Baumbach’s 2005 film The Squid and the Whale, a film that navigates with an equally despicable but more vulnerable teenage protagonist, though Margaret lacks the latter film’s tight focus.

The film is not always easy to watch, but Lonergan finds raw emotion in the everyday details of New York that are dark but not without hope and presents that emotion with compelling clarity. Sometimes he veers a bit too far toward so-called gritty realism by inserting seemingly random fragments of footage into his scenes — a ferry on the Hudson here, a seagull soaring over Central Park there — but these moments do not contribute as powerfully to the viewer’s impression of realism as the cast’s performances.

Unfortunately, the film’s release puts it at a slight disadvantage, as the obviously significant events of 9/11 and the Iraq War seemed outdated upon its release, though the theme of revenge, for the death of one woman on the street, or thousands in the two World Trade Centre towers or in the Middle East, is obviously very relevant to the plot itself. This objection will certainly fade with time, and perhaps the film can be more fully appreciated after an interval of another six years.

Margaret is, if not a brilliant piece of cinema, at least another affirmation of Lonergan’s talent as a screenwriter and artist of human emotions. Paquin plays her vile character with great passion and supports the equally superlative cast, from J. Smith-Cameron, who plays her mother, a theatre actress, to side characters like the happy-go-lucky Paul (Kieran Culkin).

New York, I Love You (2009)

André Crous

USA
3.5*

Directors: 
Various (see review)
Screenwriters:
Various
Directors of Photography:
Various

Running time: 102 minutes

How does one review an anthology film? For me, the most important question, given the fact that the film is released as a single feature rather than as separate short films, is whether the world presented by the different films make up a single identifiable world. In other words, do the different stories somehow draw on the same reality? Is there consistency between the different storylines? The answer to this question is a very definite yes.

A thematic follow-up to the 2006 film, Paris, je t’aime, which consisted of 18 short films, the New York version is more streamlined (only 10 shorts), which facilitates better interaction between the different parts. Also, whereas the Parisian stories were all very clearly demarcated by titles, New York, I Love You sometimes cuts between stories and characters. This approach allows the film to feel much more like a single world, as opposed to the many different realities in producer Emmanuel Benbihy’s previous film in this “Cities of Love” series, which will include upcoming anthologies on, among others, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai and Jerusalem.

The film is structured similarly to Paris, je t’aime in the sense that every episode is directed by a different director with his or her own screenplay, actors and crew, and the episodes are separated by transitions during which we get to see a few images of the city in the title. Having 10 shorts, as opposed to the 18 of the previous film, certainly gives the producer and the editor tighter control over the flow of the film, and while none of the episodes equals the best ones in the Paris film (the divorced elderly couple in the restaurant; an American woman in Paris), none of them is as bad as the worst ones in the previous film either. (Do you remember the vampire story? Or the Chinese hair salon? Some of the shorts in Paris, je t’aime were downright amateurish.)

Despite the many different faces behind the camera, ranging from Fatih Akin, Mira Nair and Brett Ratner to people I’d never heard of before, such as Joshua Marston and Shunji Iwai, the film is consistently funny, and the twists and turns of the different episodes are constantly cute and fuzzy without being syrupy sentimental. But make no mistake, Marston’s film, which comes last, has the same mixture of laugh-out-loud comedy and bittersweet love that made the final episode in Paris, je t’aime – the American woman in Paris, by Alexander Payne – such a treat. Of course, big “New York” directors like Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese were not involved, although Allen might have made a very appropriate contribution. These two directors had already participated in a New York anthology project in the 1980s called New York Stories, with Francis Ford Coppola as the third contributor. The reputation of these three directors notwithstanding, I think New York, I Love You far surpasses the bar set by New York Stories.

Apart from Joshua Marston’s story (which he wrote himself), in which an elderly couple played by the always-ready-with-an-answer Eli Wallach and the lovely Cloris Leachman shuffle towards the pier, lovingly complaining about this and that on what proves to be a very special day, I also enjoyed an episode (directed by Wen Jiang) with Hayden Christensen, who picks the pocket of Andy Garcia, before getting the tables turned on him, and two episodes in which one person tries to pick someone else up on the street – the first stars Ethan Hawke and Maggie Q, and the other Robin Wright Penn and Chris Cooper. These two episodes were both directed by Yvan Attal and strike a wonderfully naughty yet beautiful note.

In a film such as this one, a short will be out of place if it lacks the properties common to the others. The only film that truly feels out of place, and whose 10 minutes go by much more slowly than is the case with any of the others, is the short by Shekhar Kapur, starring Shia LaBeouf and Julie Christie. It is a dry daydream and doesn’t have the wit nor the energy of the other films.

The shorts have the same idea behind all of them: The theme of love is evident in a story that starts off in a certain direction before some twist is revealed, often to the great pleasure of the viewer, who has been duped by the director. The films all fit together very well (except for Kapur’s film) and are a valuable addition to the Cities of Love series.

I look forward to the next instalment.

Directors (in chronological order):
Randall Balsmeyer (transitions)
Wen Jiang
Mira Nair
Shunji Iwai
Yvan Attal
Brett Ratner
Allen Hughes
Shekhar Kapur
Natalie Portman
Fatih Akin
Joshua Marston