Sex in our movie culture is usually full of dysfunction - if it's not downright harmful, it's at best desultory and unsatisfying (think "9 Songs"). She said that he was trying to make an antidote to all of the other films out there that treat sex just as explicitly but in such more negative ways. Lee explained what Mitchell was trying to do with this film, and I greatly admire his ambition. I saw a screening of this at the Chicago International Film Festival, and two of the actors, Sook-Yin Lee and Lindsay Beamish, were on hand to answer questions. However, it is to Mitchell's great credit that I left the film not remembering the sex as much as I remembered some of the beautiful emotional moments, of which "Shortbus" is chock full. As happens with any more conventional film that contains material we are used to seeing only in bona fide pornography, the sex tends to dominate on a first viewing it's so hard not to be distracted by the explicit scenes and ignore the other things going on. Such is "Shortbus," John Cameron Mitchell's emotionally affecting follow up film to his dazzling debut, "Hedwig and the Angry Inch." By now, everyone knows that "Shortbus" contains many scenes of quite explicit sex.
Meanwhile, all of these characters meet regularly at Shortbus, a sex club where everyone is free to be whatever they want to be, where no one's a freak because everyone's a freak, and where, most importantly, everyone feels a sense of community in a scary post-9/11 world.
A professional dominatrix excels at abusing clients, but brings that abusive behavior to her personal relationships as well and as a result isolates herself from any true human contact. Two gay men find themselves drifting from one another and introduce a third man into their relationship in an attempt to bring some fulfillment back to their emotional connection. More power to it.A married sex therapist doles out relationship advice at work but privately spends her time in search of an orgasm, which she's never had. I suspect, however, that "Shortbus" really is the wave of the future, particularly in forward-looking societies. At the very least, the film is a welcome change from your mainstream Hollywood assembly-line cinematic trash. It is a cinematic theme that is much needed in America, where hatred and intolerance toward all things nonconforming seriously risk diversity of thought and behavior. Unorthodox both in substance and style, in a society that too often demands traditional correctness, "Shortbus" is Mitchell's cinematic plea for cultural compassion and mercy, tolerance and acceptance.
And the film's music captures a progressive feel, and varies from nouveau jazz to the stirring humanistic anthem "In The End", performed by the entire cast, and led with flair by Justin Bond. The film's costumes and production design are terrific. I especially liked Justin Bond, the club's tour guide. Most of the characters are to varying degrees pleasantly unique. The film's sex scenes are explicit and graphic, but never exploitative. The film's weak plot steers them to the Shortbus, wherein sex and open relationships trump everything else in life, as if people obsess about sex every minute of every day.
DeBoy), consult a young sex therapist named Sofia (Sook-Yin Lee) who, as it turns out, is in need of some therapy herself. As a gay couple with relationship problems, James (Paul Dawson) and Jamie (P.J. Director John Cameron Mitchell dares to take a retro-clinging America into the twenty-first century with this brave, humanistic art-house film wherein an ensemble cast of little known actors and numerous non-actors portray characters exploring emotions and relationships in a New York City underground club called the Shortbus.