18, 102 mins
Shortbus is John Cameron Mitchell’s arthouse “shocker”, and the most explicit movie to win a general release in the UK. The surprise is not the spicy pornography, but the disconcerting sweetness of the script and cast. The film has the rhythm of a creaky stage musical, and the emotional growing pains of an adolescent child.
The opening sequence is a comic medley of sexual abandon. A sex therapist called Sofia is having exhausting but unfulfilling intercourse with her husband, Rob. James has discovered an unlikely yogic position where he can fellate himself. A stalker in the apartment block across the street takes photographs of James. And a grumpy dominatrix called Severin whips a spoilt young client in a hotel room.
For all the desperate sex on display the film is decidedly unerotic. Shortbus is the name of a New York nightclub where open-minded strangers meet for sex and company. It has the melancholic vibe of an old-fashioned Berlin cabaret and perfect manners to match. “It’s like the 1960s with less hope,” sighs the gaudy master of ceremonies, Justin Bond.
The film is hinged, almost by habit, around his precarious club. The plot shadows a handful of newcomers and regulars. Paul Dawson’s depressed James is making a secret suicide video for his eager and smothering boyfriend, Jamie (PJ DeBoy). Sook-Yin Lee’s sex therapist has never had an orgasm but lies to her husband. And Lindsay Beamish’s prostitute Severin takes Polaroid snapshots that capture inadvertent moments of confessional pain.
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The intimacy of the relationships puts a cold douche of reality on the screen voyeurism. Mitchell’s mostly gay cast are people who have lost or never found the confidence to “feel”. The undiluted whimsy is intolerable.
The raw sex has its moments. The scene in which DeBoy hoots The Star-Spangled Banner into the rectum of a grateful club member is a collector’s item that I suspect will never feature on The Antiques Roadshow.