Nearly 20 years after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, John Cameron Mitchell’s ensemble dramedy Shortbus (2006) is still best known for sprinkling unsimulated sex among its cast’s dramatic travails. What’s surprising, after finally getting around to this movie whose reputation precedes it, is how Mitchell employs the gimmick. He doesn’t seem to entirely be aiming to titillate or shock; the generally few-and-far-between instances of uncensored sex or masturbation instead work to either underscore the unhappiness undergirding the sex lives of the characters or the unhappiness that materializes the moment the heat of passion has gone cold. The same effects could undoubtedly be achieved if Mitchell were to go with more commonplace simulation, but part of the charm of the movie is its willingness to say “why not?,” its understanding that it doesn’t need to explain itself if the basis of its infamy proves not distracting but a naturally fitting thread in the film’s fabric.
Shortbus oscillates between several characters connected by their participation in the sex-forward salon “for the gifted and challenged” of the title, where artists and the artist-adjacent commune to socialize and/or hook up usually orgiastically. There is Sofia (Sook-Yin Lee), a sex therapist who hates being called as much long suffering from an inability to orgasm; James and Jamie (Paul Dawson and PJ DeBoy), a long-term couple having trouble adjusting to their new status as “open” and with James’ deeper-than-understood depression; Severin (Lindsay Beamish), a dominatrix finding her professional aggression infiltrating her real-life relationships to a frustrating degree; and Ceth (Jay Brannan), a 23-year-old singer-songwriter of endearingly gangly acoustic songs looking for love who becomes the Jamies’ third, oblivious to the complications unseen until things start getting grave.
Sometimes teetering into the absurd, Shortbus is consistently very funny; many of the best laugh lines are apportioned to the infectiously unself-conscious, beglammed salon host (Justin Vivian Bond) terrific at selling lines like “it’s just like the ‘60s, only with less hope.” But the film is even better as a serious venue for its characters to at last confront the areas of disaffection, erotic or otherwise, gnawing at them.
The performances, mostly from people whose relationship with acting is at most dilettantish, are all winning. Their amateurishness endears you to them more. But Dawson does especially astounding work as a man so far into secret suicidality that he tells someone, after they discover that he’s been piecing together a video-as-scrapbook doubling as a suicide note, that he can see happiness encircling him but finds that it mostly ever just seems to bounce off his skin. All in Shortbus ends a little too neatly for a movie so happy to dwell in the messiness of life. But I also can appreciate what it’s offering: the idea that you ought to, in life, appreciate the instances of what feels like resolution if ever they materialize.
Peterson Reviews 