John Cameron Mitchell - Shortbus

Naughty and Nice in a Carnal Carnival



As utopian visions go, it doesn’t get much better than “Shortbus,” a film in which all you need is love — and sex, lots and lots of mutually, sometimes collectively, pleasurable sex. John Cameron Mitchell wrote and directed, though orchestrated might be the better word for a carnivalesque romp in which men and women engage in sex in a multitude of creative combinations. An ode to the joy and sweet release of sex, the film manages to be a sincere, modest political venture that finds humor where you might least expect it, notably in a ménage à trois featuring a cheeky rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.”



It may be no surprise that questions of beauty and the sublime, as well as those of politics, rarely factor into the equation when a frisky blond neighbor in a pornographic video casually drops by. But it’s incredible how most nonpornographic films are also dumb about sex, particularly in America, where copulation too often leads to frenzied violence or soft-core clichés. Mr. Mitchell, who previously wrote, directed and starred in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” has said that he wanted to make a film in which sex wasn’t negative or dreary. He also wanted his creation to serve as “a small act of resistance against Bush and the America we live in because it’s trying to remind people of good things about America and New York.”



Set in rooms scattered across Brooklyn and Manhattan, “Shortbus” locates much of that good in the hearts, minds and bodies of a young gay man, James (Paul Dawson); his married therapist, Sofia (Sook-Yin Lee); and a lonely dominatrix, Severin (Lindsay Beamish). Struggling with the most intimate of problems, each seems one teardrop away from a meltdown. The sorrow plaguing James, who’s in a committed relationship with the relentlessly upbeat Jamie (P J DeBoy), and Sofia, who’s married to the seemingly stolid Rob (Raphael Barker), prevents each from fully committing to their partners and, by extension, to the world beyond. For her part, Severin, at once naughty and nice, communicates with others mainly by way of an efficiently applied whip that’s begun to leave welts on her psyche.



Mr. Mitchell isn’t the first nonpornographic filmmaker to incorporate sexually explicit material into his work, but he may be the most optimistic and good-natured. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Catherine Breillat and Lars von Trier, among others, each have gone where few career-sensitive filmmakers dare. But enterprises like Nagisa Oshima’s 1976 shocker, “In the Realm of the Senses,” an explicit story of sexual obsession that culminates in castration, tend to turn on the mind more than the body. Designed for intellectual provocation and aesthetic transgression rather than purely instrumental purposes, the sex in films of the more serious sort tends to be a drag. There is, surprise, surprise, nothing like naked bodies writhing under the aegis of a political metaphor to dampen the libido (and spirit).



Make those bodies laugh as well as writhe, as Mr. Mitchell does here, and the metaphors can feel less punishing, more palatable. The title of one of Ms. Breillat’s gentler provocations is “Sex Is Comedy,” which Mr. Mitchell could have borrowed for his own. The man was born for vaudeville: he likes big laughs and gestures, both in abundance here as coupling bodies. He also likes funny noises, goofy accouterments and soapsuds of drama: one character in “Shortbus” wants to die; another wants to experience what the French call the little death. Yet another likes to watch, a nod to the pleasures of voyeurism that in time also becomes a lesson about vacating your comfort zone for a role in the human comedy.



Unlike traditional hard-core features, in which the sexual encounters interrupt the story like a number in a 1930’s Busby Berkeley musical, the carnal interludes in “Shortbus” are integrated into the narrative, much as the singing and dancing are in “Oklahoma!” This integration goes a long way to normalizing the sex, making it seem matter-of-fact, natural, and it also normalizes watching this kind of material in the kind of public space where you don’t need a roll of quarters to keep the images flowing. Mr. Mitchell sustains this sense of everyday ease even when the characters start frequenting Shortbus, a sex club with the relaxed vibe and noise level of a nice restaurant, albeit one with condoms on the menu rather than small plates.



Part cabaret, part commune, the club functions as an adults-only playground, as well as a testing ground for Utopia; in other words, it’s America without the plastic, the fear and the hate. Mr. Mitchell has said that the title “Shortbus” refers to the smaller yellow buses sometimes used to shuttle special-needs students to school. That doesn’t mean that the kids aboard his bus shouldn’t receive the same breaks as those riding on the bigger buses; if James and Jamie wanted to get hitched at City Hall after a night of swinging, Mr. Mitchell would probably be happy to act as a witness. But mainstreaming into a culture that insists on turning people and sex into commodities, among its other ills, may not necessarily make for a happy ending.



Mr. Mitchell finds his happy ending in raucous music and warm caresses, in an oceanic feeling in which everyone is free to be freakily you and me. His idealism is pleasingly touching and just maybe a bit naïve. It’s an idealism that feels out of place next to the hot-to-trot television housewives, panting pop divas, cringingly graphic memoirs and novels in which sex is an index of late capitalism at its most bleak. Certainly it’s deeply, if promisingly, at odds with an American movie mainstream that has grown progressively more prudish about sex over the last three decades, while its representations of violence have grown more obscenely violent. Hollywood says let it bleed. Mr. Mitchell would rather we get off on life.