If you’ve ever wanted to sit and contemplate Michael Fassbender’s cock for about 5 minutes, this is your movie.
Shame (by director Steve McQueen) reunites Fassbender’s cock with his director from Hunger and co stars the dude who somehow made it through the WW2 pacific theater with long hair and no lice (HBO’s lame Pacific) and Gordon Gekko’s ugly daughter, and several dozen nudity friendly actresses.
Fassbender plays a transplanted (in his youth) Irishman living in New York who is addicted to sex. (We can get into whether or not that’s even a real condition or not at a later date, personally I just think some people like to bone more than others and no preference qualifies as unhealthy) He’s got his professional life together (except for the porn on his work computer, that seems like a rookie mistake) and uses his adequate compensation to indulge his hobby, which is fucking. I use that word deliberately, he can’t get it up to make love, and in order to achieve full bone there has to be an element of sleaze for him. He doesn’t distinguish between cybersex, prostitutes, spanking it in the office john, dating, or the random hookup. To him they may as well be slightly different flavors of salsa. And he likes salsa. At one point in the film he expresses confusion as to why people even get married in “this day and age”. He sees that as unnecessarily limiting.
But, when his sister (daughter Gekko, Carry Mulligan who actually turns in a solid performance, all joking aside) crashes at his place unannounced, his perfect world is marred. She’s just as freaky as he is but it manifests itself slightly differently. While he disdains attachment, she craves it to an obscene degree. She meets Fassbender’s (lameass from Pacific) boss and seduces him that night. And they hook up in Fassbender’s place. He can barely handle her presence in his life, having to hear her screw sends him over the edge.
But really the story is about Fassbender, the tragedy isn’t his sex life (that’s pretty awesome) the tragedy is he is unable to make or see the point in connection to another human (beyond boning); it even seems to revolt him.
This film is beautifully shot. It’s about sex (or at least the motivation for it), and there’s a fair amount of bonery, but somehow its not gratuitous. The story is told in images. Dialogue occurs but it often has nothing to do with the actual narrative, which is almost entirely visual.
This is a solid film, but its not for the sexually squeamish.