Shame

At any film festival, there are always a few movies that provoke debate. (If there aren’t, the festival is doing something wrong.) At the most recent Seattle International Film Festival, an Australian film called Shame managed to ignite a few disagreements, which may be the film’s purpose in existing.

It’s an unusual movie, a sort of hybrid. At its most basic, the film is a traditional western, dressed up in modern clothes and speaking the current language. But the elements are the same, and it’s in a direct line from such international spinoffs of the western as Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars.

Like those movies, Shame is about a lone character who rides into an isolated, troubled town. Surveying the violent situation, the lone rider proceeds to clean up the situation himself. Or, in this case, herself. That’s the twist of Shame – this lone rider is not a grizzled man but a modern woman, and she rides not a horse but a motorcycle.

The bike needs fixing, which is why Asta Cadell (played by Deborra-Lee Furness) is stuck for a couple of days in the godforsaken town of Ginborak in the first place. The uneasiness in the town comes from an ugly secret, surrounding the rape of a teenage girl just before Asta arrived in town.

Everyone, it seems, knows who was responsible for the crime: a group of violent young toughs whose behavior is casually condoned by the boys-will-be-boys attitude of the town elders. But no one does anything about the crime, and half the town lives in fear.

Asta, who is a lawyer on a rambling sabbatical, gradually decides to take the law into her own hands, and give some of the town’s women a lesson in self-defense. The movie accelerates with Asta setting traps for the wrongdoers and cracking their heads together when they get too close.

All of which is in the best Eastwood/Bronson tradition. But this makes for an uncomfortable fit, because the movie (directed by Steve Jodrell and written by Beverly Blankenship and Michael Brindley) tries to convince us it’s something more elevated than a revenge melodrama.

Actually, Shame is every bit as overheatedly manipulative as any movie of the Walking Tall variety. The villains even kidnap a little old granny and begin slapping her around. Ultimately, the film teaches mistrust and paranoia. When Asta hears a twig break in the middle of the night, she immediately rolls out of bed and prepares to waste somebody. Somehow this isn’t quite the high-minded and laudatory message – that women must be self-possessed and independent – that the film seems to be intending.

Shame does inspire reaction from audiences. And one such reaction was the voting of Deborra-Lee Furness as Outstanding Actress in the Seattle festival.

First published in The Herald, July 29, 1988

Well, this sounds pretty good, and I don’t remember what I was beefing about. I don’t know what the controversy was, and maybe I’m just remembering sitting around Bill’s Off Broadway with a bunch of friends and arguing about it. This movie should be the best-known thing about Deborra-Lee Furness, but she is married to Hugh Jackman, so there’s that.