In ‘Shame,’ you make it a foursome

Four human beings writhe together in the frenzied climax of Steve McQueen’s “Shame.”

There’s Michael Fassbender, starring as the emotionally stunted, sex-addicted New Yorker Brandon Sullivan. Then there are two female actors, DeeDee Luxe and Calamity Chang, Brandon’s playmates in his final bout of impersonal, soul-destroying physical release.

And the fourth participant? Why, that would be you, dear viewer, says McQueen, the film’s British director and co-writer with playwright Abi Morgan. As the camera zooms in and out of the pile of jackhammering bodies, alert to every thrusting limb and despairing grimace, the viewer is meant to feel drawn into the fray, fully implicated in the protagonist’s humiliation — as well as in his tortured humanity.

“It has to be a foursome,” says McQueen in his characteristically colorful, machine-gun intellectual patter. “It’s the audience — you’re in there as well.”

With its unblinking depiction of pleasure-less lust and empty catharsis, that scene “consolidated everything” the film is trying to say, McQueen adds. And “Shame” tries to say a lot, albeit it with a bare minimum of verbosity.

Enigmatic, unsettling and full-frontally frank, the NC-17-rated film emerged from the fall festival circuit as one of the Oscar season’s most praised and divisive films.

That was no surprise to anyone acquainted with the British polymath McQueen, an art college graduate and experimental filmmaker who turned his eye to features with his 2008 “Hunger,” about Irish Republic Army prisoner-turned-political-martyr Bobby Sands.

Fassbender likewise had a proven flair for creative unpredictability. In addition to “Shame,” this year he has showcased his versatility by repossessing Mr. Rochester in the latest “Jane Eyre” remake, buffing up to superhero scale as Magneto in “X-Men: First Class” and matching wits with Viggo Mortensen’s Sigmund Freud as Carl Jung in David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method.”

In fashioning “Shame,” which is as much a study of Internet-era urban anomie and unresolved past trauma as it is of sexual obsession, McQueen wanted moviegoers to see a part of themselves reflected in Fassbender’s antihero, who could’ve wandered out of a Charles Bukowski short story. Except that the two main characters in “Shame” — Brandon and his estranged sibling, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), a wannabe nightclub singer who’s as desperately needy as her brother is closed off — aren’t meant to be viewed as Bukowskian lowlifes and losers.

“This is not a moralist film at all, for me, because it’s not judging Brandon,” McQueen says. “I love Brandon very much. It’s like ‘Freaks,’ the movie — he’s one of us.”

Having worked with McQueen when he portrayed Sands in “Hunger,” Fassbender didn’t hesitate to sign on again with the visually oriented director, one of whose signatures is carefully composed, thoughtful images that can tell a story better than reams of dialogue. Fassbender thinks one of the film’s strengths is that it eschews a paint-by-numbers approach to psychological portraiture, allowing the movie’s subtext to slowly seep to the surface.

“I always think that there are intelligent filmgoing audiences out there,” says the Irish-bred, German-born actor, 34. “They can do the work, and they can fill in the blanks and participate. And sometimes their imagination or that participation is much more interesting than what you might be able to express as an actor or a writer or a director.”

McQueen’s willingness to trust audiences, Fassbender and Mulligan say, is mirrored by his trust in performers, to whom he grants unusual freedom. In return, he expects them to give freely of themselves. McQueen says he requires actors “to bring a little bit of themselves into the character.”

“I’m not interested in acting,” he elaborates. “Acting is a certain thing, but they have to be present in the room. Of course it’s acting. But it goes beyond a certain kind of illustration of a character. You have to break through a boundary.”

In the numerous scenes that take place in Brandon’s cramped Manhattan apartment, McQueen and director of photography Sean Bobbitt gave Fassbender and Mulligan plenty of space to improvise, then followed the impromptu action as if choreographing a ballet.

“He [McQueen] is like your biggest cheerleader,” says Mulligan, who’s also been shooting across screens this fall as the L.A. damsel in distress guarded by Ryan Gosling in “Drive.”

“He’d come in and be like, ‘Ah, it’s like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers!’” Mulligan continues. “He saw everything as a dance. Or he’d come in and give some football analogy, ‘It’s like it’s half-time and you’re 4-nil up, but we could be 8-nil up. I know we can!’ Just like insane enthusiasm.”

Fassbender concurs. “He speaks very honestly and openly, and he’s not afraid to seem nerdish or feminine or vulnerable or unsure. And so that really kind of shows there’s a lot of courage in that.”

McQueen also made the strategic decision to hold separate discussions with Mulligan and Fassbender about the nature of Brandon and Sissy’s peculiar familial connection, allowing each performer to settle on his or her own interpretation rather than spelling out all the nuances in advance.

That lends the queasy central relationship in “Shame” a teasing ambiguity that has put some reviewers in mind of another film about the mysteries and perils of erotic fixation: Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 “Last Tango in Paris.”

“It’s almost like a dog whistle going off in the cinema,” McQueen says. “Everyone knows, but no one’s saying anything. I’m not saying everyone’s a sex addict — but everyone can identify with him.”

reed.johnson@latimes.com