By Andy Smith
Starring Justin Bond, Sook-Yin Lee,
P.J. Deboy
Directed by John Cameron Mitchell
Rated NR
Ever attend a party where casual conversation gave way to improvisational weirdness, where surrealistic spontaneity created amateur art and music of sudden magical significance?
Such bacchanalian peaks may leave the participants wondering, “Why can’t life always be like this?” Or perhaps, people ask, “Why did we go there?”
Such fleeting moments of beauty occur often, but rarely?even in the age of so-called reality television?do they get captured on film and shared with millions.
Now, imagine making an entire movie based on the interactions between couples and friends at an underground salon named after the special-needs school bus, the “Shortbus.” Describing the scene, flamboyant queen and host(ess) Justin (Bond) declares, “It’s just like the sixties, only with less hope.”
John Cameron Mitchell sets his follow-up to the over-the-top Hedwig and t he Angry Inch in New York City, where the opening shot of the Statue of Liberty becomes a symbol for libertines. Building the entire film in an improvisational and intensive manner, Mitchell gives back to his community by casting the community?including the incomparable musician Bitch as herself?and creating the script in workshop fashion.
More about strained relationships and social commentary than erotic satiety, the steamy, and often silly, sex remains central to Shortbus. But Mitchell weaves the prolifically prurient parts so seamlessly into this psychological comedy that viewers should be warned of wanting anything remotely pornographic.
However, as testimony to the gravity of the film’s graphic nature, while set in New York and starring many New Yorkers, for distribution purposes, it’s actually an unrated foreign film. Shameless and self-assured, Shortbus shocks?not with the sex?but through profound intimacy, soulful perversity, and honesty.
Subplots include a sex therapist and couples’ counselor, Sofia’s (Sook-Yin Lee) journey to achieve orgasm and gay boyfriends James (Paul Dawson) and Jamie (PJ Deboy) exploring non-monogamy in a three-way scene with Ceth (Jay Brannan).
As one character remarks while welcoming people to the steamy club, “Voyeurism is participation.” With this line, Shortbus invites its shyer viewers to join the funky fray. While such a gesture invites the kind of “don’t dream it, be it” camping of Rocky Horror nerds, there’s something more radical and real here than anything in Rocky Horror, Hair, Rent, or other sentimental and superficial versions of utopian subculture and American strangeness.
Not recommended for the sexually squeamish, Shortbus fights the culture war with lust and love, fearlessly inviting you to the kinds of places your parents warned you about.
Shortbus opens Oct. 27 at the Belcourt in Nashville. 18 and up.
