New York, New York Carey Mulligan (from Shame, 2011)
via team56th
I’m surprised this hasn’t been taken down from YouTube yet. Anyway…
In his review of Steve McQueen’s Shame, Glenn Kenny suggests that this particular scene veers closely to kitsch, undermining the seriousness of the film’s intent. And the hard areas of my brain understand what he means. These are probably the same parts of my cranium that wondered if “New York, New York” is too over-familiar in popular culture to be effective in a scene like this.
But the softer areas lead me to feeling crushed as I watched this scene. With a series of close-ups of the two leads cut to Mulligan’s performance, McQueen implies without exposition the traumas that Mulligan and her brother (Michael Fassbender) have survived, not unscathed. And while “New York, New York” might be a well-worn staple of pop music, I think it has two meanings in the film. The song, as performed by Frank Sinatra and probably anyone else, is a celebration of freedom by means of escaping to the city of every possibility, the potential of every dream fulfilled (or as a parody of those ideas). Mulligan’s performance suggests that these characters might have moved to New York to run from their past, but haven’t escaped at all. Maybe this is too “on the nose” (the hard parts of my brain again), but it worked on me (there’s the soft parts talking).
