by Chris Feil
There is reinvention of a golden standard and then there is what Shame does with “New York, New York”. Carey Mulligan’s Sissy interrupts the life her sex addict brother Brandon, played by Michael Fassbender, initiating his decent into rock bottom. But when he goes to see her perform in some anonymously upscale bar, her rendition of Frank Sinatra’s musical calling card similarly halts the film’s syncopated rhythms. Sparsely orchestrated, Sissy goes off-melody and off-tradition, singing an unexpectedly fragile version that McQueen uses to link the emotional brokenness between siblings. Decidedly not the triumph we are used to hearing in a Sinatra horn section...
The vocal arrangement begins atonally, as if to immediately confront your expectations of what the song is supposed to be and represent. Then Mulligan personalizes it in both style and subtext until you forget you are watching a bold piece of reinterpretation at all. What was once an anthem about seizing your own place in the world becomes a ghost of itself, as if it was a reprise after life turned out to fulfill none of the dreams it used to promise. “It’s up to you, New York...” now sounds like a final plea.
Much in the way this scene makes us rethink the implications of the lyrics of this formerly jubilant anthem, the film wants us to question the toxic masculinity that makes us shrug off someone like Brandon, reduce his struggle to that of the playboy. In a time where the idea of sexual addiction can still be treated as a punchline, McQueen begs us to consider the line where habit becomes self-destructive. It’s fitting that the movie is musically dismantling a classic that is perpetually attributed to a macho guy with his own troubles we overlook for the sake of buying into his image.
The scene halves the film, finally giving it an emotional language to speak definitively on its themes after establishing Brandon’s repetitive behaviors. In this regard, Sissy disrupts the film as much as she does Brandon’s illusion of sustainability as he masks himself in sex. The camera mostly stays on Sissy, facing her vulnerability head on as Brandon cannot ever muster. He looks away, moved to tears. Everything is unspoken, inferred, but their separate and shared pain is suddenly very very loud.
And at the heart of the moment is a blindsiding performance by Carey Mulligan. Mulligan’s vocal performance highlights both Sissy’s childishness and scarcely contained damage, all while presenting a very different Sissy than the one we see offstage. Here she takes all of her baggage and morphs it into a delicate, wounded persona not unlike how Brandon packages his sexual mystique. Sissy can’t subdue her perpetual longing (nor does she probably want to), so instead she entrances us with it, masks its primacy through the intellectualism of reinterpreting the song. McQueen smartly assumes we won’t be able to take our eyes off of her and holds that tight closeup as Mulligan rewards it with micro-tragedies of vocal and physical restraint.
And this reinvention of song works in tandem with McQueen’s unflinching trajectory for the film as a whole: one not of heroic self-actualization, but of bodies and spirits breaking, ultimately asking an unfeeling world for a final chance at rescue.
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