Brandon is a young, wealthy New York executive. He lives in a beautiful apartment overlooking Manhattan, is athletic, attractive, and women like him but has not been in a relationship longer than four months.

He is also discreetly paranoid, obsessive compulsive sexual addict. His basic paranoia indexes him to the order of rituals punctuated daily without anything having to interfere with his organization. Sex is imagined, watched compulsively, practiced only occasionally otherwise something doesn't work.... This apparent order is destabilized when her sister Sissy, goes to settle in her home, sleeping with Brandon's boss, an unrepentant philanderer, married with children.

It was difficult to better tell the story of an addiction to sexuality and the body experienced as a prison. Steve Mc Queen, a British video artist, does it excellently even going so far as to offer images of Brandon close to the facial expression of Christ's passion, a Christ, in this case, nailed to the cross of his body.

After Hunger, his first feature film, in which the protagonist rebels against the brutal treatment to which he is subjected by prison guards by starving himself to death, in Shame, the director tells the story of a man who would have all the prerogatives to lead a "normal" life and is likewise completely at the mercy of the urges of his body.

It is a detail what Brandon's addiction and Sissy's constant suicide attempts may have entailed; what matters is the depiction of bondage.

The body is the object of the film, the greatest instrument of torture for self-destructiveness.

23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice