Shame | 2011
- Locations |
- New York
- DIRECTOR |
- Steve McQueen
With an apartment full of sex mags, a work computer clogged up with porn and a uncontrollable compulsion to come on to every female he eyeballs, Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender) is barely holding his life together in New York when his troubled sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) turns up to stay.
Sullivan’s world is a bleakly monochrome Manhattan, where he lives bang in the centre of the city in a functionally minimalist apartment at 9 West 31st Street and 5th Avenue.
Sissy sings the world's most melancholy cover of New York, New York in the glittery golden Boom Boom Room at the top of the Standard High Line NYC, 848 Washington Street, at W 13th Street in the Meatpacking District. The hotel itself features more famously later on.
Brandon likes his sex anonymously, and is not averse to getting a bj from a guy at nightclub Quo, which stood at 511 West 28th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, a few blocks to the north. Nightclubs come and go quickly in New York.
Aiming for something more than a one-night – or a ten-minute – stand, Brandon takes work colleague Marianne (Nicole Beharie) on a date to the classy Italian restaurant ’inoteca, 98 Rivington Street at Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side. Another casualty of New Yorkers' fickle tastes, this too has closed.
Things don’t work out, though, after an unsuccessful afternoon with Marianne in a room at the 18-story Standard High Line NYC, towering above the trendy Meatpacking District.
He’s clearly more comfortable with the anonymity of a total stranger in the same hotel. Floor-to-ceiling windows allowed filming of the famously explicit scene to be watched by half the population of Manhattan. If you stay at the Standard, I'm sure you’ll be more discreet.
Beneath the Standard, the long, open Pier 54, West Street at West 10th Street, juts out into the Hudson River.
It’s on the pier that Brandon breaks down after his sister’s suicide attempt. The striking steel arch at the entrance is a remnant of the shed where ocean liners once docked. The pier now provides one of Hudson River Park’s main event spaces