SHAME
****
CONTAGION
***
One of the best reasons for seeing Hunger, Steve McQueen's debut feature film, was the performance of Michael Fassbender as Irish hunger-striker Bobby Sands.
He is also a good reason to watch Shame, McQueen's coruscating follow-up, co-written with Abi Morgan, about a sex addict. Here he plays Brandon, a thirtysomething businessman living comfortably in his New York apartment where he entertains a stream of women. Whores will do if there's no one else available.
Fassbender acts out a part with obsessional intensity until the arrival of Sissy (Carey Mulligan, in an equally provoking part) his wayward and possibly suicidal sister. If Brandon has needs, one of them seems to be to keep her from going entirely off the rails.
McQueen's film-making is undoubtedly powerful and without compromise, especially during the frequent sex scenes, which depict a man on the edge intent on propelling himself over the cliff. The only weakness is that the film provides so few clues as to precisely why Brandon is creating a kind of sexual prison for himself. It is obviously something in the couple's past, but what?
We don't have to be told the whole story. But it would help a film, the remorseless journey of which in the end becomes counter-productive. But you can't criticise Fassbender, whose command of the screen is total.
A bevy of stars adorn Steven Soderbergh's Contagion which graphically shows what might happen if a deadly virus assailed the world and nobody knew how to break the code that might cure it. Marion Cotillard is a kidnapped WHO doctor, Matt Damon is one of the few to be immune, Jude Law is a campaigning journalist, Kate Winslet and Jennifer Ehle are doctors and Gwyneth Paltrow dies early and has her skull stripped open.
Soderbergh, with a budget to roam the world, gives us genuinely creepy moments as information and misinformation spread as fast as the mutating virus itself. But this is more of a commercial blockbuster than food for thought at a festival.
None the worse for that, but able to make us giggle a bit as well as shiver.
Shame / Contagion
