Michael Fassbender stars as Brandon in Shame. (Handout)
Shame is a brilliant drama; it may also be the most uncomfortable 100 minutes you spend in a movie theatre this year.
Michael Fassbender stars in Shame as Brandon, a successful businessman with an out-of-control sex addiction. He lives and prowls in New York City, where his everyday life is an endless cycle of Internet porn, prostitutes, one-night-stands, group sex and an ever-escalating need for physical action that never, ever involves intimacy of any kind. It's frankly terrifying.
Brandon has his life carefully organized. He is handsome and hard-working and leads what is essentially an anonymous life. People have an idea of who he is, but he has to keep his 'normal' work life and his obsessive sexual pursuits very separate from one another. The only time they almost cross, when he dates a woman from work, is a disaster. Why? Probably because he appears to actually like the woman.
Into this rigidly controlled world of never-enough-orgasms comes Sissy, Brandon's uninvited little sister. Double the damage.
Sissy (Carey Mulligan) is like an inside-out version of her brother -- needy and greedy, too, but all crazed emotion and hoped-for intimacy -- and she's decided to stay at his place in New York. It's a problem. It's also a problem how brother and sister interact physically, emotionally and psychologically, although filmmaker Steve McQueen doesn't rush to fill in the blanks. Whatever their vaguely referred-to dysfunctional childhood might have involved, it's best left to the imagination.
The effect of having Sissy around, almost like a special sort of mirror, sends Brandon even further into self-destructive behaviour.
Shame is an astonishing movie in the ways of performance and cinematography.
Fassbender can convey tortured like nobody's business, and Mulligan -- wait until you see her sing New York, New York -- is so vulnerable here you think she might evaporate. Or explode. The city of New York, meanwhile, almost a character in the story, has never looked more isolating.
The award-winning film is hugely disturbing, and not for any reason of nudity or sexual behaviour but for what that excess suggests about how we live now. For a film that's all about one man's sex life, it's about as anti-casual-sex as is possible. (What's the opposite of titillating?)
There's a level of fearlessness at work in Shame that extends to everyone involved with it; in the U.S., the film's distributor has embraced an NC17 rating as a fitting distinction and a proper marker of grown-up fare.
