The Velvet Café

Let’s face it: the essence of film geekery is list making.

It was the first thing I noticed as I ventured into the world of cinephily this summer, joining the Filmspotting forum community and opening this café.

I soon found out that  true film fans make lists. A lot of lists. Top 5, top 10, top 100, even top 1 000 (but that guy is just insane). We appoint winners and make verdicts left and write: the best, the worst, the craziest, the cutest, the funniest, the coolest. Just about anything can be organized and ranked into a neat list.

I think there is something very reassuring in this. As long as we can put the world into a 1-10 order, we have reasons to keep believing that our existence is comprehensible as well as controllable. If there is chaos and uncertainty luring in the darkness, we can defy it and expel it with a neat bullet list.

And admit it: nothing can strengthen your usually weak ego like the aura of knowledge and authority that a well thought out ranking order provides. We’re refuse to embrace whatever movie we accidentally stumble upon without asking questions. We know how to distinguish good from bad. We’re opinionated. We know what we’re talking about. Or at least we pretend we do.

As a newbie in the film fandom I realized that I had to try to get into this if I’d ever become an accepted member in the fellowship.  After some struggling (remember, I’m the kind of person who usually can’t decide between cake or pie since I like both) managed to make something that resembled to a top 100 list. It was as if I’d gone through a passage ritual, passing a test, buying myself an entrance ticket to a new world. Now I wasn’t just an ordinary theatre visitor. I was organized. I was opinionated. If not quite yet a cineast, I could at least deserve the title Film Nerd. (No, don’t ask me to link the list. I’m still too embarrassed and discontent about it. Maybe next year.)

A time of frustration
That was a long introduction, but I wanted to make it clear how important lists are to people like me and most other film bloggers. They’re fun, they take a lot of work to make, they’re interesting to read and discuss. It’s essential. And that’s also why this time of the year is so utterly annoying and frustrating for people like me. People who live in far distant, low prioritized countries..

You see, one of the things I love most about blogging about films is that it gives me an excuse to talk to and get to know people from all over the world. I argue as much with people on the other side of the Atlantic as I’m comparing my impressions of my latest movie encounter with a Swedish blogger who lives in the neighbor city. The blogosphere recognizes no boundaries, especially if you like me have taken the decision to participate in the global discussion.

But one time a year we’re brutally reminded of that the globalization hasn’t reached the world of movies yet. A handful of movies – basically the ones that are most likely to become victims of global illegal downloading epidemics – get a synchronized global launch. Movies such as Harry Potter or the Twilight saga. But the smaller a movie is, the longer can I expect to wait for it to come up here. If it ever will come up, that will say. Quite a few of the movie discoveries I’ve made this year have been of ones that never even were shown in a theatre, titles such as Animal Kingdom an Moon.

Towards the end of this year, when all the list frenzy starts and the Oscar speculations kick off, this has become increasingly painful. Highly appreciated movies such as The Artist and Hugo won’t have their premier until late in March.

So what is a Swedish blogger to do?

Should I adjust my list to imitate the launch schedule in US, just to make it equivalent to other top lists? In that case I would have to wait making up a top 2011 list until late April at the earliest. It would feel a bit dishonest. After all it would be 2012 movies to me. And besides, who cares about the “2011 movies” at that point? That discussion is done and over with, ages ago. People have moved on and are busy ranking the movies of 2012. I’m hopelessly late to the party.

The other option is to rank all the movies that were released in 2011 in Sweden, regardless of when they came up in the rest of the world. In that case I would match late releases such as MMMM, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Drive and The Skin I Live In against Never Let Me Go, The King’s Speech, True Grit, Winter’s Bone and Black Swan. But 50/50 will not be taken into consideration since I haven’t had the chance to see it yet. How much sense will such a list make to anyone outside of Sweden?

A cop out solution
It’s an unsolvable dilemma, a brick wall raised between bloggers from different nations and regardless of what I’ll eventually decide for, it will leave me with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction.

I want to make my 2011 list when everyone else is making it. I want my 2011 list to be true and to reflect the movies I watched in 2011. Not the movies I watched in 2012. And I want to make a ranking that easily can be compared to other people’s ranking lists and spark a good discussion.

Frankly I haven’t yet made up my mind yet. I might cop out of it, stop pretending that order is possible.

Or instead of making a top list, I could hand out some awards, not necessarily always of the serious kind. My fellow Swede Emil at A Swede Talks movies made an inspiring example. Perhaps I could do something similar?

In any case: that will have to wait until next week. After all, the year hasn’t finished yet and it boggles my mind how everyone can be so quick to toss out the awards and lists, in some cases weeks before the end of the year. And even if it’s late now, we still have a few precious hours to go. I could squeeze in one last movie before the clock strikes and perhaps THAT very movie will turn out to be the best one of all. You never know.

But now it’s now time to close this final blog entry of 2011. I will end it with an image from a great New Year scene, one of my favorites.

Thank you everyone who has popped by during 2011 to listen to my ramblings and talk about movies over a drink! You’ve made this place to exactly the cozy, friendly little place I dreamed of.

Happy New Year!

I really must stop paying attention to the IMDb ratings and user reviews. By now I should have learned what a lousy instrument they are to determine whether a movie is worth watching or not. Excellent movies are downrated to oblivion. Mediocre movies reach skyrocket levels for unknown reasons. There are so many factors at play – including political and religious views as well as expressions national pride, things that have very little to do with the quality of the film.

Splice from last year is one of those that has fallen victim to the mob that dominate the database. It got a rough treatment with an average rating of 6,0 and an abundance of 1/10 star reviews from people who claim that it’s about the worst movie they’ve ever seen. You know the complaints from other movies. It’s the usual tirades about how they wanted to walk out of the theatre and how they feel robbed of their ticket payment and their time. Their main complaint is that this film is nothing but a freak show, as immoral as it is unbelievable.

Poor guys. I can’t but pity them. What a boring life they must live, stuck in their own little neat box of moral standpoints, where nothing can exist that doesn’t fit exactly into their standards! And what suffering this deficiency of suspension of disbelief must put them through! It will surely limit their options. How many great, imaginative movies won’t they miss out? How few and how boring aren’t the films that will pass their requirement for realism? It must be boring to be them. Let’s hope that science will come up with a solution, some way to fix them. A magic pill.

Disturbing and charming
But let’s screw the haters and talk about Splice. I’m blessed with a decent ability to suspend my disbelief and I really loved this weird, disturbing, touching, funny and totally charming little piece of horror influenced science fiction.

My exercise in suspension started in the very beginning of the moive as I was introduced to the main characters, the young and successful scientists Clive and Elsa. While they worked for a company called N.E.R.D, this was about the last thing they looked like. I could have sworn that Adrien Brody was the lead guitarist in one of the bands I listened to at a rock festival last summer. And this was just the warm-up of a story that turned crazier and crazier with every minute.

Basically Splice is a modern take on the Frankenstein story. With the usage of advanced and illegal gene technology, Clive and Elsa create a new life form, which they hope will carry the key to a lot of the medical issues humans have. The experiment goes astray and the beautiful and mysterious creature Dren is born. Rather than killing her, which was their idea to begin with, they end up raising her in secrecy as a daughter. However problems will occur. This was maybe to be expected, but as the movie goes on, the plot gets more and more twisted and the end wasn’t like anything I could have imagined.

From disbelief to enjoyment
My initial reaction to it was a little bit grumpy and suspicious: “this REALLY feels like a second rate film”, but somehow I was pulled into that world and mindset. It was my old geeky science fiction fan roots coming up to the surface again I imagine. I ended up in a state of mind where I accepted whatever new idea or twist that was introduced. While there were some very creepy moments, reminding me of the creepiness of Aldomovar’s The Skin I live in, it was beautiful and fascinating at the same time. The director and screenwriter Vincenzo Natali has a vivid, not to say wild imagination, and I enjoyed seeing it coming alive with the help of special effects that by far exceeded what you could expect from a movie with a budget of this size.

According to an interview in the extras, he had been waiting for ten years to get the chance to do this movie. Well, I’m glad he finally got the chance to make it. He’s not only a talented and interesting film maker, he also seems to be a genuinly nice guy. I’m glad that I discovered this film after being pointed to it and I’m glad that I’m able to suspend my disbelief so I can enjoy this kind of movies without ruining them with questions and doubts. It’s a magical world.

Splice (Vincenzo Natali, CA, 2010)  My rating: 4/5

I could definitely have picked a better get-the-whole-family-together movie for Christmas than Martha Marcy May Marlene. It wasn’t as if there was any lack of alternatives. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or the new Sherlock Holmes film would surely have entertained everyone, including my teenage daughters and the accompanying boyfriend. But we went for the movies with the four M-names, which I’ll call it from now on (I’m afraid I’m incapable of learning those four names, no matter how I try), since it was the only one that we all could agree about, the girls thanks to the trailer, the parents because of the theme, the general buzz and the good reviews.

Throughout the showing I noticed the boyfriend changing position in his chair every 30 seconds or so and I took it as a bad sign. Admittedly the chairs are awful, at least compared to the ones I’ve tried in US and UK, but I couldn’t help thinking that there was more at play than sheer discomfort. He clearly spent more time watching my daughter than the screen. And as we walked towards the parking, everyone in my company but me was complaining loudly:

“I don’t like it to be so unclear”. “It only put questions, but we got no responses”. “What’s that with the ending, I didn’t get what that was about”. “It was so vague”. “She was just so ANNOYING. Why couldn’t she just tell what she’d been through?”

I said quietly: “I thought it was really good”, but decided not to argue further against them. If they’d made up their mind so firmly, it wasn’t likely that I could say anything to change their minds.

Elusive
My company was annoyed by the elusive nature of MMMM, while I was rather stimulated by the same thing.

It could so easily have become yet another standard escape-and-recover-from-a-cult story.

There were quite a few of those some years ago. I can’t name any of them straight away, since the news, documentaries, novels and TV films melt together into a blur. But I think you remember. They contained the testimonies about the dreadful conditions at the cult, and you’d always meet ex-members who told about their escape or relatives who had kidnapped their daughters/sons, now restoring them back to sanity through deprogramming treatment.

MMMM while clearly showing how dreadful the existence in a cult can be and how damaged you get by it, doesn’t go the easy, dramatized, predictable, frequently threaded path. It requires the viewer to think, to embrace the silence and the long takes with very little action, to fill in the gaps and make her own conclusions.

Jumping back and forward in time we get to see how Martha (or Marcy May or Marlene as she’s also called, depending on the situation) becomes a member of a small following of a guru in the countryside, whose teachings we never get a full picture of. We get glimpses of the life she leads there; we see her transform into a full-fledged sect member who lures in new members and learn about an event which might have contributed to her decision to leave. As a parallel to this we see what happens in her relationship to her sister as she after two years of absence from the real world turns up at her place, since she has nowhere else to go.

It takes a while, but eventually it starts to dawn upon us that the experience has had so deep impact on Martha that her sense for reality has been damaged and she can’t distinguish what is real and what is a dream or imagination. Since we see everything through her eyes it also becomes harder for the watcher to figure out if the things you see actually take place in reality or are merely Martha’s hallucinations.

Ambiguous ending
I’d give my daughters right in that we don’t have that much to go on as we’re putting the story together, rearranging the fragments into a point A-point B timeline. There is no obvious explanation for why she joins the cult in the first place (apart from that she probably looks for a father figure and John Hawke’s character is charismatic and knows how to put the words right to snare a young woman.) Nor is it clear exactly how she takes the decision to leave it or why she’ can’t bring herself to inform her sister about the truth, apart from the general idea that she’s too damaged to be able to do even that. And the end is far from clear. If you truly hate movies with ambiguous endings, this one is probably not for you.

For my own part I thought it was surprisingly subtle, insightful and interesting, a fresh take on a topic that has been turned into movies before. It’s even more impressing that this is a debut movie that is made under the harsh conditions that the independent film making provide. (To get more details about this I can recommend listening to The Q&A podcast’s interview with the director (who also is the screenwriter) and the producers of the movie.)

But I’ll think twice before I’ll try to bring the entire family to this type of movie. Even Happy Feet 2 would probably have been a better choice to make everyone feel united in a state of Christmas movie happiness.

MMMM is something you probably better enjoy either in company with other film geeks or on your own.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin, US, 2011) My rating: 4/5

15 year old girls are sexual creatures, but we don’t see much of that in movies. Or to put be more precise: we don’t see it a lot in the kind of movies I watch. I suppose there’s a niche market with an abundance of porn films about horny supposedly 15 year old girls. But in ordinary cinemas, they’re quite rare.

Whenever we get to see 15 year olds taking part in or thinking about sex, it’s often not so much about their own pleasure, their own initiative, exploring a territory on their own conditions. They’re generally hooking up with older men, becoming objects for their desire and victims for abuse. More often than not, they end up “learning a lesson”.

Not a victim
Turn Me On, Dammit! from Norway brings a different angle to this issue, a tone and an approach which I can’t recollect seeing since Lukas Moodysson’s Fucking Åmål (Show me love) from 1998.

In this movie we meet Alma, who is far from a helpless victim, at least not as long as it comes to sex, which she craves and fantasizes about constantly. She’s horny and she masturbates, anywhere, anytime, sometimes with the help of a sex phone line. Her mother, while not being truly bigot, reacts like I think most of us would, with a bit of embarrassment and awkwardness. While we all want to be supportive and understanding to whatever our teenagers are going through, there are things that you probably don’t want to know, including listening to their loud noises as they’re climaxing while masturbating. It’s too much information and Alma’s mother doesn’t know what to do with it.

And “too much information” is something that eventually brings Alma into trouble. While she has a healthy view on her own sexuality, she lacks a bit of judgment when it comes to social codes. After an incident at a party, where the object for her desire touches her with his dick, she tells her friends about it, and it doesn’t take long before the rumor starts spreading and she becomes a “persona non grata” in the small rural village where she lives.

Easy to relate to
Recently I watched Easy A, which also has a plot with a teenage girls surrounded by sex rumors. What makes this movie different, apart from the fact that Alma actually wants to have sex and not just goes around pretending she’s had it, is the lack of lip gloss.

The people in Turn Me On, Dammit! look like people I meet in the streets, not like photo models. The bus stop where they girls share a beer and their boredom looks like bus stops where I’ve been waiting when I was a teenager, the times I didn’t hitchhike. While I’ve never had the cravings of Alma, it was easy to like her and to relate to her. It could of course just be a cultural thing; it’s nice to once in a while see something from your own part of the world.

If there’s something more I could wish for in this film, it would be better acting performances. There were moments when I cringed a bit at the way the young amateur actors delivered their lines with little more empathy than if they were reading their homework aloud. It reminded me of a school theatre setup. In the beginning this bothered me a little, but as the movie went on I got used to it and cared less and less, the more I got engaged in Alma’s issues. And if nothing else, I had to capitulate for the humor, joy, sweetness and optimism it eventually conveys.

If you’re not completely against the idea of watching 15 year old girls masturbating on screen, it’s a movie I wholeheartedly can recommend, provided you can get hold of it. Considering the content I’m not too optimistic about it getting a wide release outside of Scandinavia.

Turn Me On, Dammit! (Få meg på, for faen, Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, NO, 2011) My rating: 4/5

When is your top moment of Christmas? If you ask your kids, they might, just might raise their hands for the Christmas present opening, either it takes place on the 24th of December as in my country or on the 25th as in the rest of the world.

If you ask the parents of the same kids they might vote for the sweet hours AFTER the said Christmas present opening when they can take a quick nap in the sofa in front of the TV that shows some movie they’ve already seen and won’t regret missing out a few scenes here and there. They cherish every ounce of the temporary peace while the children are occupied with their new stuff. Next day the shops will open and they’ll have to join the endless queue of other parents who need to complain about the toy that didn’t work, change the doubles or buy those batteries that weren’t included in the package. But that’s tomorrow. Now they’re in the stress free pocket in time and space for a little while longer.

One of my personal favorite moments is the very beginning of the midnight mass in the old gothic cathedral in my home city. Thousands and thousands of candles are burning in the light crowns, but can only barely lit up the huge building, the highest church in entire Scandinavia. From somewhere in the darkness one single voice is hovering: O Holy Night. And when the choir speaks up: “Fall on your knees! O hears the angel’s voices”, I can’t keep my tears away.  Beauty is beauty, regardless of beliefs.

When Christmas peaks
But I’d say that if I’m looking for the day when the Christmas feelings usually peak, this happens far earlier – namely on the night of December 23.

It never fails. It’s as if all pieces all of a sudden fall into their places. Every inch of the house smells of Swedish Christmas. It’s a combination of burning candles, fresh orange peel, glögg (a Swedish variant of the more well known glühwein), the recently made, still warm Christmas ham (which we enjoy on a slice of dark bread, covered with a thin layer of mustard) and the green smell from the Christmas tree coming alive after we’ve brought it inside and decorated it. Frank Sinatra is singing Christmas classics to me as I’m writing the rhymes for this year. All the gifts are still wrapped up in beautiful papers and expectations. Anything is possible. No one has yet become disappointed or exhausted. The air full of promises.

The Hobbit trailer
And that’s exactly how I feel about the trailer of The Hobbit when it was released only a couple of days before Christmas.

I’m usually not a fan of trailers; at the best they’re just boring or misleading, at the worst they’re full of spoilers. So while I won’t walk out of the way not to watch them, I don’t give them particularly much attention. But the trailer for The Hobbit had me.

It’s a promise, wrapped in the most beautiful paper. It’s a package, but as opposed to other Christmas gifts I can’t open it, regardless of how desperately I want to. I will have to wait, not until tomorrow, but for an entire year before I’ll be allowed to. Even unopened, this little fragment of a movie that lies one year into the future is probably my favorite present this year.

I’m already starting to lose count of how many times I’ve watched it. There’s just so much to love. The casting of Martin Freeman as Bilbo – such anperfect choice! The glimpse we caught of Gandalf, Galadriel, Gollum and of Middlearth – such a sweet revisit! Not to speak of the wonderful song. If they didn’t have me before, they had me once they started to sing.

For any other Christmas present that would be unacceptable. But in this case, it’s rather a blessing. For one more year I’ll go around, humming that song to myself. For one more year I’ll get to watch those lovely little production videos. Regardless of how the film actually turns out to be in the end, I will have had one year of pure delight waiting for it. It’s like the magic of the night before Christmas, stretched out for 365 days.

A Christmas toast
And now only one thing remains.

Dear café guest, whoever you are! I’m glad you stopped by to rest your feet and chat for a while in the middle of the season business. I hope you enjoyed your drink. Either you’re celebrating Christmas or not, at least I hope you’ll get the opportunity to sneak into a cinema and get yourself some wonderful movie experiences the next few days. There’s an abundance of great new movies to watch right now, at least where I live. Now just to make up my mind which ones to see first… But I reckon that’s a bit of a luxury problem.

Anyway: I wish you all the best and at least one truly enjoyable moment this weekend!

A lot of movie blogs will take a few days off for the holidays. If you have cravings for something fun to read and if you don’t already follow him, I’d recommend the chocolate box we got from Roger Ebert this year, full of small, delicious lines from various reviews over the years. Some of them are very harsh, but in most cases I suspect it’s well deserved. And it’s so fun to read! How I wish I had his way with words. That would be something to put on my wish list.

See you on the other side of Christmas!

Cheers – and as we say in Sweden: God Jul!

There are a couple things in the world that give me creeps.

One of them is spiders, which bugs me (sic!) quite a bit. How I wish that I was more like Sigourney Weaver! It doesn’t make sense why a tiny little eight legged creature should be any worse than a six legged one, even when it’s got the size of an ant, but there you are. I fear them and I hate them.

For a few years I played the role of the heroic mother. I pretended they didn’t bother me since I didn’t want to inspire my children to be like me. So I pulled myself together, saying “oh, look a spider, how cute!” and tried to sound convincing. But once my kids were big enough to understand that they should trust their own judgment rather than their mother’s, I went back to follow my instincts, which meant jumping up on a chair, screaming and pointing at the monster spider that was about to eat me alive and expecting someone else to deal with it.

Bomb phobia
A second thing that gives me the creeps is when I have to watch people disarming bombs in TV series or movies.

You know how the story usually goes. Here’s a bomb that needs to be dealt with and a squad is sent in, armed with scissors, ready to cut the wires and there’s always a clock counting down and it’s going to reach zero any time now and their hands are trembling and they’re sweating all over the place and they HAVE to cut NOW and they don’t know if they should cut the red wire or the black one and they have to just take a chance on it and I’m wondering why on Earth they can’t just send in a machine to do those things, haven’t they learned to build robots YET and I close my eyes and my blood is boiling with bomb-squad-sympathy angst, not only a little bit of excitement, exactly as intended I guess, but it’s not a pleasant fear, it’s the kind of fear that makes you want to take cover under a blanket and refuse to leave your shelter EVER, at least not before the episode is over. Because who knows, that bomb might actually go off!

Now get me right: for my fears, a bomb scene in a movie isn’t a deal breaker. After all I can always close my eyes for a little while and open them once it’s over.

Nevertheless, it probably was just as well that I didn’t know what I was in for as I decided to watch The Hurt Locker, a movie which apparently won six Oscars a couple of years ago, but which I knew very little about since I don’t care that much for the academy awards.

Groundbreaking
Without having any details, I knew as much as that it was a war movie. If nothing else you could tell from the cover.

To be honest, I’ve never been all that much into this genre. I suppose all those high quality Vietnam films that came out in the 70s and 80s did more than enough to satisfy whatever desire I had for it for a very long time. There was nothing wrong with those movies, but after a while they all melted together in my memory into a soup of mud and napalm burning in the jungle heat, boys longing to go home, lost limbs, lost trust and drugs as the only comfort. I had been there and done that – not once, but many times. Too many.

However with a scenario set in a contemporary Iraq, it sounded as if The Hurt Locker could offer a different angle. I was also tickled by the information that it was made by a female director. Not only did she snatch an Oscar for it in a time where few women even get to make any movies at all. She did it in a genre that I think very few would expect a woman to go for. Of course I wanted to see it and rejoice at the fact that this kick-ass director had helped to break the ground for more women in Hollywood.

Nonstop bomb disabling
Little did I imagine that I was about to watch a movie that contained more or less non stop disabling of bombs, one after another, only broken up by a few scenes where they shot at each other instead. And little did I imagine how much it would engage me. With very little introduction to the characters or a “plot” to follow, the film had my full attention from the very first minute and kept it all the way through.

I who usually find action and war movies pretty borning, suddenly found myself absolutely immersed, not to say hypnotized, by the chaos, by the shaky hand camera, by the tension, by the people in the bomb squad, especially their leader, wonderfully played by Jeremy Renner, who has exactly the right mixture of goodness, arrogance, craziness, fatalism and charisma. These guys have a job that probably is about the worst you possibly could imagine. The theory suggested in the film from the very start in the form of a quote is that they’re driven by some kind of addiction.

Is this theory founded in reality? Maybe, maybe not. I suppose that while it’s probably not the motivation for every bomb expert, it could very well be true in a few cases. And this brings us over the question of realism. Is there any truth in it or is it just a case of free fantasies and speculation, no more believable than any James Bond movie?

I threw a quick glance at IMDb and found a huge amount of furious 1/10 reviews from military veterans who pointed out all the factual errors in it.

The script is based on or at least inspired by articles written by a journalist who followed a bomb squad in Iraq for a couple of weeks, and maybe this in combination with the shaky hand camera style led those people to believe that they would get to see a documentary rather than a feature film.

Compromises
But if want to make a film that works as a film you need to make some compromises, especially when you’re working with a small budget and under quite difficult circumstances during the recording, which was the case. After watching the “about” film in the extras, I can’t say anything that I’m impressed by how they’ve managed to create a very authentic feeling by small means. There may be flaws in it but they escape my untrained eye and they don’t take away anything of my appreciation.

I loved it. Not because it won Oscars and not because it’s directed by a woman, but because it was a great war movie that actually made me interested in watching some more war movies. I think the break I’ve had from the genre has lasted long enough.

As a side effect, all this exposure must have cured my bomb scene phobia. Next time I’ll watch someone risking their lives tempering with a bomb, it will just be another day at work.

Now to find some way to deal with my spider hang-up….

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, US, 2009) My rating: 4,5/5

“Why are you drinking?” demanded the little prince.
“So that I may forget,” replied the tippler.
“Forget what?” inquired the little prince, who already felt sorry for him.
“Forget that I am ashamed,” the tippler confessed, hanging his head.
“Ashamed of what?” insisted the little prince, who wanted to help him.
“Ashamed of drinking!”

Those lines from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Litte Prince capture perfectly the vicious circle nature of addiction. They came into my mind as I watched Shame.

This new film by the British director Steve McQueen (although the movie as such takes place in New York) doesn’t open in Sweden until January, but I had gotten two tickets for a free prescreening and was accompanied by a friend to see it. She told me that she had googled the title to find out what kind of movie we would watch.

“It seems to be an erotic movie, right?” she said merrily.

“Eh. Not exactly, not from what I’ve heard about it”, I replied. And it turned out that I was right.

Many sex acts but no intimacy
If you look at it from a technical viewpoint, it’s correct that Shame contains a lot of sex acts. I lost track on how many times we see Michael Fassbender masturbating, fucking various girls, sometimes two at a time, watching porn or just walking around naked showing the full monty in front of the camera. But even with this abundance of sex there’s nothing, absolutely nothing erotic or exciting about it. One look at Michael Fassbender’s eyes is enough to tell us what this all is about: addiction. He’s jerking off exactly like a drug addict puts a needle in his arm. It doesn’t give him pleasure but it kills some kind of inside pain he’s carrying, while it at the same time feeds this pain for the future.

If anything I think the movie is a bit off putting as far as sex is concerned. Suddenly cuddling a little and plainly holding hands seems like something that is far more desirable than having intercourse with someone.

As far as the story goes there isn’t much to say about it. There isn’t all that much going on as we’re following Fassbinder’s character. We see him at work (where he sneaks off to masturbate in the bathroom, which I suppose some men without addiction do occasionally, but not with this frequency) and we stalk him around in New York as he’s executing his addiction here and there.

After a while his sister turns up, wanting to stay at his place. It becomes obvious that while not a sex addict, she’s just as troubled as he is, but in another way. However in his condition he’s pretty much unable to give her any support. He’d rather just get rid of her so he can continue with his addiction in privacy.

Amazing performance
So there they are – two miserable and alienated persons. We don’t know much about their past, apart from a hint that their childhood was less than ideal. And we don’t know much about their future either. This is not about telling a story. It’s about showing us some of the darker sides of life, taking us to places where most of us are fortunate enough to never have been.

I think this is the kind of movie that won’t work for everyone. It’s about as close as you can come to a silent movie without actually being one. Since we spend so much time watching Fassbender in various sexual activities or merely walking around either in his apartment or in New York, there is very little dialogue. Whatever needs to be said has to be said by other means and fortunately enough Fassbender has got what it takes to do it. His performance where he can tell a thousand words just by a look or a twitch in a muscle is amazing, one of the best pieces of acting I’ve seen on a screen this year. Carey Mulligan who plays his sister is also surprisingly good and quite different to how we’ve seen her in previous roles.

New York at half speed
Most of the time I was on board with the extremely  minimalistic style of Shame, but there were a couple of occasions where I got an overdose of it, when it became so slow and subtle that I lost my patience. I’m especially thinking of an endlessly drawn out song performance where the sister sings New York New York in a nightclub at half speed and it just went on and on and it made me pretty restless. One thing happened during the song: the sex addict teared up. There was a crack in his numbness for a moment.  But oh, the time it took to get there! While waiting for it to end I listened closely to the text, desperately trying to find something in it that told me a story, that gave me a further look into what was going on, something that motivated this scene to be this long, but in vain. I know that this scene has gotten a lot of praise from many reviewers, who consider it the best one in the entire movie. I just grew impantient, as I did during the long jogging tour that Fassbinder’s character suddenly goes out for. It gave me a good look at the city, but nothing more.

However my complaints about those cenes are are just minor quibbles. It doesn’t take away that Shame is a very good movie, definitely one of the better this year.

The theme is so dark and uncomfortable that I’m not likely to revisit it anytime soon. But no one can take away from it that it gives an unforgettable portray of sex addiction.

Shame (Steve McQueen, UK, 2011) My rating: 4,5/5