The pain of pleasure in 'Shame'

New York Film Festival diaries

Dispatches from the front lines, featuring 'Shame,' 'My Week...

CHECK OUT OUR FULL COVERAGE OF THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL >

"I went out and had a lot of sex and embraced it as best as I could," jokes Michael Fassbender. The white-hot Irish-German actor is answering an awkward question during a post-screening discussion of his scathing new film, "Shame," at the New York Film Festival, where it'll debut this weekend. The question, about how he prepped for the movie, is certainly awkward, but it's legit: The movie is about sex addiction. And he plays the sex addict.

The audience lets out a nervous laugh—Fassbender's answer is a welcome ice breaker. No doubt, "Shame" is the kind of movie that makes you uneasy. Very, very uneasy.

In it, Fassbender plays a diabolically attractive Manhattanite whose voracious sex addiction seizes control his life. When he's not seducing women in subway cars, he's wanking off at work, surfing porn online or banging hookers. His horndog status quo is abruptly upended when his sister, an unstable torch singer played by Carey Mulligan, suddenly crashes his apartment and stays with him. As his raging appetites consume him, he sinks deeper and deeper into a destructive orgy of compulsion that further feeds itself.

Fassbender is riding a cresting wave of buzz that began with his astonishing performance as a real-life hunger-strike victim in 2008's "Hunger," spiked a year later with his dashing turn as a smooth-talking wartime spy in "Inglorious Basterds," and hit the mainstream this past summer with his role as Magneto in "X-Men: First Class." He's also got another movie coming out this fall—"A Dangerous Method," in which he plays Carl Jung—that also happens to be screening at the New York Film Festival.

"Shame," which has been greasing up the film-festival circuit from Venice to Toronto, reunites him with his "Hunger" director, celebrated visual artist Steve McQueen. The result is a harrowing portrait of unflinching sexual and emotional bluntness. A bristling (and oft-naked) Fassbender cuts to the chilly, desolate core of a man incapable of intimacy, constantly plumbing the depths of his depravity in an effort to mine feigned human connectivity. McQueen is equally unsparing, deploying a sexual frankness that makes you wince. This film does not titillate; it sickens.

"I didn't want to come to New York to make a film—that was never my desire," admits McQueen, who also took the stage with Fassbender at the New York fest. "The desire was to make a film about this subject matter and start in London, but guess what? No one wanted to talk to us. It was very difficult. So I asked to speak to specialists in the field, who happened to be in New York. And from there, the snowball began: OK, New York, let's go there."

Ever the visual stylist, McQueen sets up his images in purposeful tableaus of cold, melancholy beauty: stark apartments, midnight streets, empty subways. Even chipper songs get the downtrodden treatment. In one scene, Mulligan's character sings a stripped-down and aching version of "New York, New York" that zeroes in on the film's insatiable longing.

Mulligan herself is a revelation here. Raw, gripping and unhinged, she scruffs up her characteristically delicate polish and morphs into a tragic creature looking to make her own elusive connection.

"This film is all about tenderness, to communicate in an emotional way," says McQueen. "It's just about human contact, where you could feel real, feel alive."

And yet it's also an unnerving tale of what happens when the pendulum swings far the other direction. With feverish intensity and foreboding, "Shame" shows us a hellhole where unbridled, compulsive pleasure becomes its own form of pain.