I know you’re curious, so, yes: “Shame” is the film with the full-frontal male nudity, specifically Michael Fassbender’s. We see quite a lot of it as he sashays his business around the camera.
And yes, this is the movie that garnered an NC-17, a not-unexpected development for a frank, urban, erotic drama about a depressive, controlling sex addict who devotes his waking hours to the intake of porn and the outlet of gametes.
Given the subject matter, the nakedness and carnal acts are none too shocking. But Shame is a surprising film — not for what it shows, but for what it says about the toxic loneliness of sex without human connection.
Fassbender’s Brandon is so walled off from normal relations that the arrival of his free-spirit sister (redundantly named Sissy and played by a bright, wounded Carey Mulligan) tosses him into a spiral of confused resentment. There are hints at something in their past, some dark shared secret that explains the title, but never illuminates it. No need: It’s enough to know it scarred them.
Directed and co-written (with Abi Morgan) by Steve McQueen, (“Hunger”) “Shame” has a lolling pace and stunning visual clarity shaped by Sean Bobbitt’s graceful and deliberate cinematography. Structurally, it’s close to perfect — its precision echoed in the Glenn Gould recordings of Bach piano works that Brandon listens to obsessively. The film has a beautiful symmetry.
And its cadences are so gradual, the swells of its plot so low, that it feels, at times, almost radically slow. This is an odd state for a movie with propulsive sex acts, but there it is.
With his gym-carved bod and Bauhaus aesthetic, Brandon suggests a kinship with Patrick Bateman in “American Psycho,” but this a much less cynical film: It wants us to believe in attachment, affection, maybe even love.
It wants us to believe that intercourse without any of those things leads to a kind of impotence — a powerlessness over our bodies, a barrenness of the soul. When seen through that lens, the film looks altogether … what’s the word? Romantic. Now, that’s a surprise.
