Steve McQueen Part Two: Shame (2011)

One brief wiki research later and I discover McQueen comes from an artistic background. Well quelle fucking surprise as the Peep Show quote goes. Shame is another dose of visual majesty - again with the endearingly appellated Sean Bobbitt as cinematographer: they gorge themselves voraciously on artistic camera effects, lighting and costume to enact another wonderful tale of emotional heartbreak and substance.

We get more flair and more Fassbender, this time trying to hide his own sexual desperation, a man lost in the over-stimulus of New York City. His character, Brandon, is at once charming, charismatic and desperate, depraved. His outside social face is struggling to remain ahead of the filthy darkness that pervades his private life: his safe place, home, where he can indulge in the activities he knows would be considered perverted and unhealthy outside of his mind, is

invaded by his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) who brings her own wealth of problems into his life, forcing onto him a responsibility that serves only to worsen their already dysfunctional relationship. Nearly every image is dipped in grey hues, like Brandon himself who regularly wears blandly coloured scarves and coats, as a way of demonstrating people's outward normality belying internal turmoil. His only hope is the brightly dressed woman on the subway, a metaphor of narrative perhaps but nonetheless poetic.

McQueen crafts another picture that is constructed by the metaphorical building blocks and clues he craftily scatters throughout every frame, yet these are organic constructions that don't require inordinate amounts of attention. They are obvious yet subtle enough for us, the audience, to understand the life and inner workings of Brandon without immediate distraction. It's scary because he just an ordinary thirty-something man. Worse even, he is successful and financially secure; it undermines the central component to our capitalist societies, that wealth equates to unconditional happiness.

I don't know how McQueen has acquired such a striking command so early in his filmmaking career, just two films in (Hunger too of course). There aren't many others with the immediate grasp of directorial techniques that he has. His next, 12 Years A Slave, and out soon, looks muy muy promising.