Shortbus

"Shortbus"
John Cameron Mitchell, 2006

This film starts off with a bang. In a literally orgasmic sequence, we witness many people, throughout New York, having all kinds of explicitly depicted sex. It is here that we meet the sex therapist, Sofia (Sook-Yin Lee), in the middle of having sex with her husband, who cannot achieve an orgasm, a depressed gay man named James (Paul Dawson) taping himself while he engages in auto-fellatio, and Severin (Lindsay Beamish), an antisocial woman who is using S&M on a client.

It's certainly a different way to open a film, and afterward, each of these characters, in a predictable manner, run into each other at Shortbus, a nightclub for people who wish to explore the boundaries of their own sexuality. The film's greatest accomplishment is its ability to make the sex look appealing and repulsive at the same time; we can understand why people would love and hate this kind of lifestyle. This depiction of sex, however, is at the expense of making the sex feel natural and meaningful; the film's over-the-top visual style and staging of the sex sequences quickly grow repetitive.

There is a strange, disjointed feel to the entire narrative, perhaps due to the fact that the characters and story were developed with the cast, that lessens the film's overall impact. This disjointedness is especially apparent in the narrative concerning James. We know that he is depressed and that he feels he cannot connect with his boyfriend, Jamie. "I see [Jamie's love]... all around me... but it stops at my skin. I can't let it inside," he says at one point. Yet the film never really delves into the character's internal turmoil; when James tries to commit suicide, his plight feels like an arbitrary plot development forced into place by the filmmakers. The film attempts to focus on the fact that each person is different, and that certain things turn them on and turn them off. But, armed with only a cursory insight into these characters, this is a film whose parts - pun intended - are greater than its whole.

Fun Fact: My friend's uncle, Tim Perell, was the producer of "Shortbus."

Rating: 6

First Viewed: 7/3/08, on DVD
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