Sexy lonerBy John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time," "Cinema Classics," and "On the Marquee"
"Don't have sex man. It leads to kissing and pretty soon you have to start talking to them." Steve Martin
Shame is a film with little conversation that makes real pornography look romantic. Don't let the NC-17 rating fool you: there's no prurience here, just the story of a man, Brandon (Michael Fassbender), obsessed by sex, so dominated by it that when he is not trolling for women, he's watching porn on his computer, even at work.
How he succeeds in the corporate world, distracted by his obsession and loading his computer with images, is one of the mysteries of a film that seems less interested in sex than in showing the addictive personality. Brandon doesn't so much long for the stimulation as he does contact with other human beings that requires a level of passion his own corporate and personal life don't give him. "Dour" would be the best way to describe him, a zombie of sorts who seeks prey to fill a need director Steve McQueen minimally spells out.
Brandon seems to exist in a zone of solitude where sex is its lifeblood. The lift could just as well come from drugs, so indifferent does he seem to the normal stimulations of living.
When his sis (Carey Mulligan) comes back onto his life, he resents her upsetting his self indulgent world, and yet as slutty and disorganized as she is, she forces him to look outward even if it is to see him in her. What the director/writer does not do is provide the much-needed background for their truancy, the family history to provide context for a brother and sister lost.
To see Brandon shed a tear while Sis sings a slow version of New York, New York is to get a glimpse of an interior guarded most of the time by actor, script, and director.
Needless to say, although little explanation is forthcoming, the sense of a wasted life is palpable, the depiction of an emotionally barren human being exceptional (witness the modern, barren Manhattan sets). Given Brandon's apparent talents in the corporate world, and his expert seduction record, it is indeed a "shame" he can't escape his self-imposed prison.
Sissy Sullivan: "We're not bad people. We just come from a bad place."
John DeSando co-hosts WCBE 90.5's It's Movie Time, Cinema Classics, and On the Marquee, which can be heard streaming at http://publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/ppr/index.shtml and on demand at http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/arts.artsmain He is also a film critic for Fox 28. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.RR.com