Shame (R). Director: Steve McQueen. Starring: Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan. 101 minutes
Films about addiction tend to follow a formula, albeit one that chimes with reality. When we meet the addicted character they are generally 'functional', their addiction hidden in the margins of a more civilised lifestyle. The film tracks their 'downward spiral' as the addiction takes an ever larger place in their life and feeds other destructive behaviours.
At some point the character hits rock bottom, before a tragedy — or near tragedy — affecting themselves or a loved one, provides an emotional and psychological shock that has the potential to break the pattern of addiction — a Pyrrhic victory.
The best of such films — and Shame is among them — achieve this in a way that is not merely voyeuristic, but which offers insight into the nuances of the character's emotional and psychological makeup, and their humanity. As a story about addiction, Shame follows the formula. What makes it distinctive is that the addiction in question is not a drug or other substance, but sex.
The film is not reticent about its full frontal consideration of this subject. Within the opening minutes we see Brandon (Fassbender) walk naked across his apartment, the camera placed unabashedly at waist height. Biologically speaking, Brandon's genitals are at the centre of his addiction, and therefore presumably at the forefront of his addicted mind.
His addiction finds several expressions. These range from the excessive use of pornography (including on his work computer), to one-night stands with women seduced in bars, to more deviant behaviours such as paid cyber sex via webcam. There are graphic scenes, yet the most powerfully erotic captures merely an exchange of lewd glances between Brandon and a stranger on a train.
The sex Brandon uses to fulfill the demands of his addiction is divorced from intimacy. As a matter of fact he finds himself physically unable to engage in sex with the one partner with whom romantic involvement seems like a possibility. Immediately afterwards, he engages the services of a prostitute to satisfy his craving. Evidently his impotence was of an emotional rather than physical nature.
He fears intimacy, perhaps only partly due to the personal shame of his addiction. It is offered to him by his sister, Sissy (Mulligan), yet he responds to her with rage and contempt. She, like Brandon, bears wounds from an unnamed past trauma: 'We're not bad, we just come