I was watching a film about sex the other day.

It's not what you may think. Certainly there was every possible combination of gender, body parts, and positions, not unlike a rather lurid version of Twister, but it was also the least sexy thing I've seen in a very long while. I'm not talking about Steve McQueen's new film Shame, about the life of a sex addict in New York City, but a French documentary called There Is No Sexual Rapport, about what happens behind the scenes on a porn film set.

No Sexual Rapport is often a startling film, not simply because all illusion is immediately stripped away, but because something altogether more complex emerges in its place. Beneath the pitiless gaze of a stationary camera's wide-angle lens, humanity in all its bored, sad, woebegone frailty peeks out like a snail from its shell.

In between takes, there isn't much to do except sit and wait, which is what the men and women of the porn world do. They simply wait around, for the lights to get set up or shot sequences to be arranged. The fact that they do so stark naked, shaved and implanted, or gussied up in black harness gear, becomes irrelevant after a while. Naked bodies are pretty much all the same no matter how much surgical and plastic intervention they've endured, it is the eyes of the people that you end up watching. Beneath the blank bored expressions, flickers of inner life are like shy forest creatures. You wait with bated breath to see if they emerge from the undergrowth. In the moments between the action, surprising gentleness ensues as despair invades bodies wrung out and softened with exhaustion, spiritual and otherwise. Small gestures of kindness such as a glass of water offered, or a brief pat on the back, somehow have more profound impact than the endless pounding endured by every possible orifice on the human body.

"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower," as Dylan Thomas described it, is fully in evidence here, but this endless, ferocious biological imperative can feel like a prison after a time, or, more correctly an addiction.

'Shame'

Which brings me to Mr. McQueen and his Shame. Shame is the story of a New Yorker named Brandon, who is a sex addict. Actor Michael Fassbender, whose previous collaboration with Mr. McQueen produced the film Hunger, brings true thespian conviction to the role of Brandon, meaning he drops his pants. With his chiseled body and sizable penis, he is probably on the furthest end of the good-looking index of sex addicts. But despite outwards appearances, Brandon's interior is a roaring inferno of ugly compulsion, literally at the mercy of his tyrannical organ.

Whether at work, at home or on the New York subway, sex works him like a puppet. This is clear from the film's opening scene, in which Brandon locks eyes with a titian-haired temptress. The dance of come hither, run away begins, despite the presence of a rather large wedding ring on the woman's finger. The chase is on and the chase never ends.

Brandon works in a glass and steel tower, and lives in another similarly austere tower. Inside his perfectly clean white apartment, he cuts the sterility of his existence with hookers, online porn chat rooms, anal, double anal, creampies, etc... Like any addict, Brandon's life is very much a managed existence, controlled and self-medicated with the endless drip of sex. It isn't until his unstable wreck of a sister aptly named Sissy descends that the fragile shell of Brandon's life cracks and collapses, revealing the snail's soft insides.

Sissy behaviour

Sissy herself has some major issues, namely a propensity towards self-harm and a weakness for sleazy men. A jazz chanteuse in the Marilyn Monroe style of little-girl-lost, Sissy has genuine talent and self-destructiveness in equal measure. In this, she and Brandon are a matched set. In the charged scenes between brother and sister, violence and desire slide along so close together, it is almost impossible to separate one from the other. You're never quite sure if they're going to kiss or kill each other. The family that produced these two is alluded to, but never rendered explicit. Your brain can easily fill in all the missing pieces. As Sissy says, "We're not bad people, we just come from a bad place." I don't think she means New Jersey.

Sissy sleeps with Brandon's married boss, leaves wet towels everywhere and makes messes wherever she goes. She is a one woman force of chaos, and as much an addict as her brother, albeit not for sex, but emotion. Desperate pleas of "I love you, I love you!" come out like a howl of need.

As brother and sister bring out the worst in each other, Brandon's descent into the sexual abyss is filmed with near-exquisite detail. Mr. McQueen, who heralds from the visual arts world, brings a degree of control and precision to the scenes of Brandon's downward sexual spiral. It is this very artfulness that started to bother me at a certain point in the film. Perhaps it is the difference between the documentary treatment (on display in No Sexual Rapport), where sex is awkward, clumsy, and ridiculously mechanical to the fictive version, where music and elegant editing weed out all the clumsy, boring and embarrassing bits.

McQueen, as a director, seems loathe to give up control in this regard. He tells you what to think and where to place your eye at all times in the film. Signs and signifiers are everywhere, whether it is the word FUCK scrawled graffiti style on the wall above characters' heads as they do exactly that, or street signs that direct your line of sight, everything is positioned just exactly so. The level of art direction that pervades the film, from the musical cues assigned to each character (Brandon marshals his inner chaos with the formal cool of Bach piano concertos, and Sissy, reveals the void inside through the saddest rendition of "New York, New York" ever committed to cinema) becomes programmatic after a while. I felt as if I was being frog-marched along by the filmmaker. "Leave me alone, Steve McQueen!" I thought. Certainly McQueen is a formidable talent, but for all its NC-17 scenes, I didn't feel anything in Shame. Maybe this is the idea, no feeling, no emotion can exist in Brandon's world. Which is fine for Brandon, but not for the audience watching him.

No escape

If the deep and pervading coolness of tone that suffuses the film is meant to keep you at a distance from the characters and their travails, it succeeds too well. Yes, you see Brandon enthusiastically bury his face in the buttocks of a young woman, and pound away like a piston, his handsome face locked in a rictus of what could either be pain or pleasure. Some demon inside of him furiously hurries him from encounters in a Dantesque gay sex dungeon, to bathroom self-abuse sessions and random humping in New York's down and dirty streets. Lurching along you start to wonder if our hero has any skin left after a while, or at least one hell of a case of chafing. There is no rest for the wicked, as they say, but Brandon isn't evil, he is sick, and this sickness provides the only genuine pathos the film actually has.

His quest to escape his addiction takes various shapes, including a purge of his apartment of all sex-related paraphernalia. Piles of porno magazines, sex toys, even his laptop are stuffed into trash bags and deposited on the curb, perhaps to the delight of the New York City Sanitation workers. Later, an attempt at a genuine date with a colleague turns into a mortifying affair, leaving him once more at the mercy of his compulsions. Off he sets once more, flailing about, gaze fixed mournfully in the distance, penis galloping along, like a dog let out for a run in the park. After a while, it's hard not to want to laugh, but the film is a resolutely serious affair. There is no snickering allowed. That only comes afterwards, when you're describing the plot to someone else.

In this, it is interesting to read critical assessments of the film, which appear to be fairly equitably divided between critics who reject this seriousness of intent and those who embrace it fully. Fuck this film, whether used as an expletive or more correctly as an imperative, remains open, but the final questions lingers, what exactly is the point? Are we meant to pity poor driven Brandon, always at the mercy of his own appetite, or celebrate his rejection/revoking of desire. It is understandable that one wishes for liberation from the endless push, but escape is an ambiguous thing. The film's final scene has no answers, only one very large symbol. But like Dante before him, it is a titian-haired unattainable beauty that represents salvation, a way up and out of the inferno.