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Brandon (Michael Fassbender) is a New Yorker who shuns intimacy with women but feeds his desires with a compulsive addiction to sex. When his wayward younger sister (Carey Mulligan) moves into his apartment stirring memories of their shared painful past, Brandon's insular life spirals out of control. -- (C) Official Site
Only One Thing on His Mind
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: December 1, 2011
More About This MovieThe cruel paradox of addiction is that it transforms a source of pleasure into an inescapable, insatiable need. An abundance — an overdose — of movies and books explores the logic of this condition, mostly with respect to drugs or alcohol. “Shame,” the relentless new feature from the British artist turned filmmaker Steve McQueen, has a lot in common with films that plumb the toxic romance of the bottle or the needle. The crucial difference is that its protagonist, a handsome, youngish Manhattanite named Brandon (Michael Fassbender), is hooked on sex.
This poses a special challenge for Mr. McQueen, since there are rules, conventions and cognitive habits that limit how explicit — and how explicitly unpleasant — movie sex can be. Watching someone else take a drink or snort a line will not cause intoxication in the viewer, but watching other people get naked and squirm around together is a sure-enough turn-on to be the basis of a lucrative industry. How can visual pleasure communicate existential misery? It is a real and interesting challenge, and if “Shame” falls short of meeting it, the seriousness of its effort is hard to deny.
Mr. McQueen does not take the easy route of selecting for his case study a lonely, unattractive shut-in, but rather a very good-looking, admirably proportioned fellow with nice clothes (when he is in them), decent manners and a well-paying job
. Brandon, who works at a small high-tech firm and lives in an austere apartment in a Chelsea high-rise, seems to be stuck in a sleek, downbeat 21st-century version of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. That poem, as incisive an anatomy of erotic compulsion as exists in English, begins by evoking “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame” and cycles through the rages and frustrations of lust before collapsing in exhausted fatalism:
. Brandon, who works at a small high-tech firm and lives in an austere apartment in a Chelsea high-rise, seems to be stuck in a sleek, downbeat 21st-century version of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. That poem, as incisive an anatomy of erotic compulsion as exists in English, begins by evoking “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame” and cycles through the rages and frustrations of lust before collapsing in exhausted fatalism:
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
to shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
“Shame,” anchored to the treadmill of Brandon’s pathology, strips this ancient, futile wisdom of its poetry. Mr. McQueen is a tenaciously literal filmmaker, mistrusting metaphor and psychological speculation and dwelling on the facts of behavior and bodily experience. His debut feature,“Hunger,” in which Mr. Fassbender played Bobby Sands, the I.R.A. militant who starved himself to death in a British-administered prison in 1981, was an unflinching look at the corporeal consequences of political zeal. It focused less on the nature of Sands’s cause than on the effects, on his own person, of his commitment to it.
of Brandon’s pathology, strips this ancient, futile wisdom of its poetry. Mr. McQueen is a tenaciously literal filmmaker, mistrusting metaphor and psychological speculation and dwelling on the facts of behavior and bodily experience. His debut feature,“Hunger,” in which Mr. Fassbender played Bobby Sands, the I.R.A. militant who starved himself to death in a British-administered prison in 1981, was an unflinching look at the corporeal consequences of political zeal. It focused less on the nature of Sands’s cause than on the effects, on his own person, of his commitment to it.
And the most memorable aspect of that film may have been Mr. Fassbender’s commitment to the role, a discipline he re-enacts here in circumstances that are only superficially more pleasant. A prisoner of his own needs, Brandon — to use a curiously apt Victorian phrase — abuses himself mercilessly. When he cannot manage a casual encounter, he calls an escort service, and when that is inconvenient, there is always an Internet chat site or the men’s room at work, where he sneaks off for solitary daytime activity.
His routine is disrupted by the arrival of his sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), whose neediness is the opposite of Brandon’s emotional detachment and whose sloppiness threatens his self-control. Her history of self-abuse apparently includes cutting and possible suicide attempts, and her intrusive dependency provokes Brandon to frightening and otherwise uncharacteristically violent displays of temper.
Different as they are, these siblings clearly share a self-destructive tendency, the sources of which lie somewhere in the background, beyond the reach of the film’s curiosity. “We’re not bad people,” Sissy says in a teary message she leaves on Brandon’s cellphone. “We just come from a bad place,” a place specified only as New Jersey.
The New York they find themselves in is a melancholy and seductive place, where easymoney and relaxed sexual mores combine to produce an atmosphere of general anomie brightened by a few glimmers of comic possibility. In one brilliantly executed early scene, Brandon stands by as his boss (James Badge Dale), a boorish would-be ladies’ man, fails spectacularly to pick up a pretty blonde at a bar. Brandon succeeds without making an overt move or saying very much, and Mr. McQueen’s deft choreography of eye contact reveals everything we need to know about the workings of desire.
and relaxed sexual mores combine to produce an atmosphere of general anomie brightened by a few glimmers of comic possibility. In one brilliantly executed early scene, Brandon stands by as his boss (James Badge Dale), a boorish would-be ladies’ man, fails spectacularly to pick up a pretty blonde at a bar. Brandon succeeds without making an overt move or saying very much, and Mr. McQueen’s deft choreography of eye contact reveals everything we need to know about the workings of desire.
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