Starring: Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, Nicole Behrie, James Dale, and Hannah Ware.
Distributor: Independent
Runtime: 101 mins. Reviewed in Feb 2012
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This film captured Best Actor Award, for Michael Fassbender, at the 2011 Venice Film Festival. It is the story of a man addicted compulsively to sex. Fassbender’s performance has to be judged in the context of the movie’s restricted classification for adult viewing only. Relatively few movies are as explicit as this one in showing male sexuality so concretely, rawly, and perversely. The film brings together Fassbender and Steve McQueen, who worked so effectively with each other in “Hunger” (2008). Both that film and this one explore obsession in people who see no way out.
Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender) is a junior executive in an unnamed business firm in New York. He is so obsessed with sex that he masturbates at work during coffee breaks, has sex with prostitutes and bar girls at night, and preys on vulnerable women in subway trains with whom he is able to make seductive eye-contact. He surfs hard-core porn at work and at home, and participates actively in on-line sex forums. He has an insatiable need to have sex with anyone, including himself, anywhere, and at any time, and engages in gay sex just for the release. As drugs can lead to addicted craving, so sexual need consumes his everyday thinking and behaviour. Beneath his calm, and suave exterior there is a pathological desire for sex that has rendered his life completely joyless and without feeling. Brandon is not capable of love, or any intimacy. He realises that he has a problem of which he is ashamed, but he sees no resolution. Constant sexual episodes take us deeper into his disturbance.
Brandon survives in anguish and pain, until his alcoholic, night-club-singing sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), insists on staying with him in his comfortable New York apartment. She is damaged too. She can’t stop making commitments, while he has the problem of being unable to make any. She is emotionally over-expressive, while he struggles to express any emotion at all. They need each other, but can’t connect. When Sissy has sex with Brandon’s boss in Brandon’s bed, Brandon begins a downward spiral. The episode releases Brandon’s troubled anxieties, and is the clue to our realisation that beneath his addiction lie anger and self-loathing. Director, Steve McQueen never exposes us to the reasons why Brandon and Sissy behave in the way that they do, except we are told that they have a background that has damaged them both. The details of their up-bringing (“we just come from a bad place”) are left to our imagination, but both crave warmth they can’t find. The film does not at all serve the prurient interest, despite this description of its content. Instead, it presents us with scenes that are disturbingly powerful. The movie illustrates dramatically a very significant message. Most of the people in the film behave appallingly, yet the film makes the basic moral point that physical and emotional relationships require genuine feeling and joy to be meaningful.
The movie shows that human degradation will occur when that doesn’t happen, and it conveys this message relentlessly, and ferociously. Such is the intensity of this film, in fact, that it burns this message into the mind. The film is a searing depiction of the nature of human need out of control, and shows how lives are ruined when neurotic need can’t be extinguished.
Fassbender’s performance as Brandon is exceptional, and Mulligan’s performance as his sister is almost as good. The whole time, McQueen’s direction stays assured, and controlled. The dialogue between Brandon and Sissy on Brandon’s couch is terrifying; McQueen is the master of scarifying conversations that bare the human psyche. Frequently, Brandon appears off-centre on screen, which emphasises his emotional detachment. The pace of the movie is slow, which focuses upon Brandon’s pain, and the film’s slow-burning tension effectively reinforces its over-all provocative impact. Through brilliant direction, we are made unwilling witnesses to Brandon’s destructive acts. The musical score fits perfectly with the tone of the film.
This is an extraordinary movie that is absorbing, audacious, and highly confronting. It is entirely deserving of its awards, but it is also a movie no child or young person should see. That warning is in the film’s classification, and absolutely must be heeded.
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