'Shame' sends shock waves through the Lone Star Film Festival

It’s hardly the kind of movie you would associate with a conservative-leaning town like Fort Worth. Then again, the sold-out crowd that turned out for Shame – British visual artist Steve McQueen’s controversial and altogether brilliant new drama about a sex addict in New York City -- on Saturday night at the Lone Star International Film Festival wasn’t necessarily your typical Fort Worth arts crowd.

Mostly twenty- and thirty-somethings, and skewing more male than female, this was a group you’d more likely encounter at a rock music venue than a film festival.

Lucky them. They ended up witnessing the best film that screened at this year’s Lone Star fest – and quite possibly the best film of 2011.

Shame explores the numbing, emotionally disconnected routine of Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a handsome if slightly chilly businessman whose every waking moment is devoted to the pursuit of sex. On the subway, he tries to pick up the women sitting across from him; at work, he surfs porn web sites and occasionally heads off to the bathroom to relieve himself. His longest relationship has been four months. He finds the idea of marriage laughable.

All of this might have quickly turned either punishing or silly – a crude Adam Sandler comedy minus the jokes – but McQueen weds his simple story to an astonishingly controlled and original visual style. (The director previously made the IRA drama Hunger, which also stars Fassbender.) He strips New York of any bursts of color, filming at night, or beneath overcast skies, in sterile, anonymous apartments or ultra-sleeks bars and clubs. He holds his camera for incredibly long stretches on the actors, lending an intensity and tension to every exchange. Each time you think he’s come up with the most dazzling feat of technical bravura, he one-ups himself. Pay particular note to the jaw-dropping sequence in which he films Fassbender jogging crosstown in Manhattan, block after block after block, in a spectacularly fluid, unbroken take

The plot sets into motion when Brandon’s emotionally fragile sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) turns up on the scene. Were the two sexually abused when they were younger? Did they have – and then hide – some sort of past incestuous encounter? Both readings are possible, but McQueen isn’t especially interested in their history. He engages instead with their desperately lonely here and now, and the anguish of two people trapped in a city and an era where it seems impossible to make a lasting connection. (There’s been many cinematic love letters to New York, but this may be the first romantic screed to the Big Apple – as if the city somehow betrayed McQueen and he’s determined to get all of his hurt up on the screen.)

As had been widely noted, Shame is hardly for the faint-of-heart or the prudish. Fassbender is frequently very naked; and the final section sends Brandon spinning into a semi-deranged, orgiastic frenzy that leaves little to the imagination. But this is also something much deeper and more powerful than a mere artistic stunt. Delving completely into his mercurial, strange and fundamentally broken character, Fassbender delivers the best daring and affecting performance I’ve seen this year. Mulligan, who too often comes across as affected or overly pixie-ish on screen, also goes for broke. Together they’ve created characters whose realness is plainly terrifying – you want to save these people, but you know you’re powerless in the face of their inevitable self-destruction.

Kudos to Lone Star, for having the guts to show this movie; and double kudos to the folks who made it. Shame is the kind of brave, bracingly original movie that renews your passion for the art form. It will open commercially in December (though the NC-17 rating will limit the number of theaters where it can play) – and I can’t imagine a more melancholy, unnerving, and yet artistically exhilarating way to enjoy the holiday season.