Full Frontal Addiction

A film about sex addition starring man-of-the-moment Michael Fassbender is packed with provocation, writes Colin Fraser.

It’s late. In a dark, seedy corner of New York one man eyes up another and follows him into a sex club. In itself, the scene is not so shocking until you remember that until that point the man has been on a one-hour shag-a-thon with women. Mostly thin, leggy, attractive women. So what has got a hetero-sex addict looking for hairy muscle beef? Michael Fassbender plays the man and told Chicago’s Time Out that it’s not about “homosexuality or heterosexuality, it becomes about a fix, and where can I get my next one?” The idea is pivotal to the film and one of many provocative scenes in a piece packed with provocation (so much so it got slapped with an R18 certificate – the cinematic equivalent of being sent to a Naughty Corner to think about your actions).

Shame is Steve McQueen's follow up to Hunger, an astonishing account of prison strikes in Northern Ireland, and is no less arresting. The director's brazen, forceful gaze has crossed the Atlantic to rest on the well-ordered, middle-class life of Brandon (Fassbender), whose carefully structured existence is shattered when sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) arrives with more baggage than Louis Vuitton. A little because she’s a nutcase, a lot because she gets in the way of his addiction.

Brandon’s glacial emotional state is cold enough to bring on a new ice age, and sex is the only thing that affords him any human engagement. Recalling a socially repellent Patrick Bateman on a sex-binge, he eventually cops off with a guy. “People think, wow, this is his descent into hell, and it’s not the case. Many addicts that are predominantly heterosexual end up with a guy,” said Fassbender. As with any addiction he argues, choice is gone. “You put yourself into a scenario that you wouldn’t normally do.”

When nominated for a Golden Globe, Fassbender found himself among Hollywood’s hottest: George Clooney, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. The difference is that he was the only one to go full-frontal in a big way. Yet it was an unarguably un-erotic bathroom scene, rather than any of the sexual shenanigans, that attracted the restrictive rating. “Half of us have a penis,” Fassbender fumed of the controversy, “and the other half have probably seen one. So why should it be more acceptable to chop people’s heads off, or shoot people?” He finds the certification muzzle ridiculous. Shame, he added, is “a serious film that deserves to be treated as such”.

In cinemas now.