Shortbus

Directed by John Cameron Mitchell

John Cameron Mitchell makes history with Shortbus—a bright, impudent new chapter in New York bohemian cinema. A comical S&M scene in front of a penthouse view of Ground Zero says more about the Big Apple mood than the 9/11 Commission Report. Yet Shortbus avoids the usual hometown gloating by Hollywood-financed mascots Woody Allen and Spike Lee or even Andy Warhol’s self-distancing party games. It succeeds because writer-director Mitchell’s freaky-deaky social observations balance what’s funny and what’s cutting. 

One of Mitchell’s trendy young East Village characters proclaims, “I love cute people!” That such a fatuous notion can define one’s own humanity is a peculiarity of our time. “Cute,” the penultimate gay male approbation (“hot” being the ultimate) is a measure of the shallowness that prevails in a culture where transgressing has turned into narcissism. Mitchell penetrates downtown outlawry and gets at the emotional need behind its liberated facade. The film is both satire and reportage. This is especially welcome given the almost complete failure of recent documentary films to record society’s spiritual crises. Mitchell’s fiction doesn’t pretend to defend how sex and privilege mix in Red State culture, but the phenomenon’s highs and lows are inherent in his bold and unfazed attitude. 

Mitchell’s four farce-troupe leads are a look-alike gay couple, James and Jamie (Paul Dawson and PJ DeBoy), who consult a relationship therapist, Sofia (Sook-Yin Lee), who shares her own intimate issues with Severin (Lindsay Beamish), a dominatrix she encounters at a weekly “salon” that also functions as an androgynous sex club. This multisexual, multiracial gathering—a hip Brooklyn party called “Shortbus”—promotes a series of orgies that strain with utopian purpose. It’s a meeting place presided over by Justin Bond (of Kiki & Herb fame, but here playing himself) who describes his patrons as the generation for whom 9/11 was “the only thing real that ever happened to them.” It shows how our fragmented culture has, paradoxically, launched a new era of exhibitionism.

Fearlessly addressing the vulnerabilities hidden in hedonistic subcultures, Mitchell recognizes how uninhibited, licentious sex masks emotional displacement. His quartet fuck furiously in order to avoid connecting. This isn’t an artistic breakthrough like Julian Hernández’s magnificent Broken Sky, which changes the cinematic depiction of sex and emotion, but it’s a tougher view than what is presented by most bohemian chronicles (such as the specious, sentimental Broadway disaster Rent). By fitting lusty ennui into New York City habit, Mitchell is able to reveal a large and believable social condition. 

I never expected a movie this playfully adroit and poignant from the director/star of the calamitous Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The events of 9/11 must have sent a jolt through Mitchell, causing him to understand that boho grandstanding on its own has little justification. Shortbus benefits from Mitchell’s seasoned theatricality; his personal/professional experience guides the performers past their egotism to reveal the roots of their vanity. While reflecting hipster values, Mitchell’s sitcom gimmicks (such as a misplaced remote-control sex toy) save the cast from the pathetic self-humiliation Warhol allowed. Mitchell set up a workshop situation where sexual daring became part of the story told. This extreme, buoyant version of Mike Leigh’s workshop process is Mitchell’s own “Shortbus”—what one reveler calls “a salon for the gifted and challenged.” 

Shortbus answers the modern-art challenge to confront moral confusion. It gives new meaning to the double-entendre “truly gifted.” These very good actors create humorous, layered and affecting characterizations, surpassing the apocalyptic consensus “vision” faked in Magnolia. Each one is involved in some kind of art work (like Mitchell’s papier-maché Manhattan skyline), suggesting home-made free-will—the folly risked by remaking morality and mocking established social ideals: A terrific Jennifer Aniston pun is matched only by James’ explanation, “I started hustling after watching My Own Private Idaho.” 

Rejecting Gus Van Sant’s now-depraved example, Mitchell has sharpened his own Fassbinder affinity. That James’ low esteem contrasts his marketable physical assets is a cosmic joke worthy of Fox and His Friends—and Mitchell tops that with a devastating f/x graphic. Too bad Shortbus’ musical finale (“We All Get It In The End”) is so meretricious. Its philosophy is as arbitrary as the spin-the-bottle scene that threatens to dead-ass the movie. Luckily, Mitchell already climaxed with James’ love lament: “I see it all around me but it stops at my skin.” 

Shortbus puts modern sex follies in perspective. If Gregg Araki’s kaleidoscopic Nowhere was Gen X’s La Dolce Vita, this is Gen Y’s funny-and-raunchy Rules of the Game.