Shortbus does not beat around the bush. You know what you’re in for as it starts off with a few minutes of real sex, performed by different people in different locations and positions, cumulating in one massive simultaneous orgasm. So Shortbus is porn, then? Actually, it’s not. It’s all about sex, but much more than that, it is about love and feeling and about finding someone to have a cup of tea and a real talk with. In a lot of ways, Shortbus is nothing you expected it to be, and everything you didn’t.

In an unusual process of experimentation, actor collaboration, team scripting and improvisation, writer and director John Cameron Mitchell has created a movie that’s hard to describe, but easy to understand. By all means, you should imagine a movie about strange people and kinky sex to be shallow, dirty and with a bitter aftertaste of emptiness. But Shortbus, surprisingly enough, is warm, compassionate and funny, and leaves you feeling real and alive. The title is borrowed from an American term referring to a bus that takes students to special needs schools. In this context, people use it to express the fact that they accept and embrace their nonconformity.

The people in Shortbus definitely fit that bill and come with an assorted set of neuroses and unfulfilled dreams. But they are also very real and loveable. Scattered over a post-9/11 New York City, they all look for something they can’t quite define. There’s Sofia (Sook-Yin Lee), who counsels unhappy couples for a living and whom we see having long, raunchy sex with her husband Rob (Raphael Barker) in some remarkable positions and with an apparently amazing climax. What we only find out later, however, is that Sofia fakes all her orgasms. She has never had an orgasm in her life and she’s sick of it. Then there are Jamie (PJ DeBoy) and James (Paul Dawson), a good-looking gay couple going through a rough patch. James, a former street hustler with melancholy eyes, is deeply sad and thinks their relationship needs to be spiced up with a threesome. Jamie, on the other hand, is a happy and extroverted guy who just wants to love everybody, “especially cute people”. The two end up on Sofia’s couch, where the couples counsellor is more engaged in her own problems and ends up so frustrated, she slaps Jamie in the face, telling him to shut up. She apologises by saying that she is “pre-orgasmic”.  

But before we get to that orgasm, there is still some serious work to do. “The Jamies”, as a friend calls the couple, invite the sexually frustrated Sofia along to the Shortbus gatherings, an obscure late-night get-together, where a colourful group of people engage in open political, artistic and sexual exchange. It doesn’t matter if you are the former Mayor of New York, a transvestite or just lonely; at Shortbus, everyone is welcome and everyone is the same. They all come here because they want to “see if they could feel something”- no matter what. It’s almost like a meeting place for those who have tried everything else and are now ready to step into another land. Looking at a group of copulating people, one character sighs: “It’s just like the sixties - only with less hope.”

At Shortbus, we also meet Severin (Lindsay Beamish), a dominatrix who takes sad photographs and thinks she is free of illusions. But when Severin and Sofia start to befriend each other, a deeper truth begins to emerge. As cracks appear in the tough façade, Severin suggests she could help Sofia to have an orgasm in return for some “real human interaction.” Later, we see the dominatrix sobbing as she explains that what she really wants is “a house, and a cat.” Sex is everywhere in Shortbus; it becomes something of a metaphor for lost dreams. There is nothing sleazy; it is merely the language the characters use to talk about their emptiness. And sometimes about love. All the sex in the movie is real, yet these acts are less confronting than the emotions and conclusions the characters eventually dig up throughout their journeys of self-discovery. Sex is simply a tool, a stepping-stone on everyone’s expedition to love. The ultimate goal is to feel something, but the path to it is long and winding. When Jamie talks about emotion, with tears streaming down his face: “I see it all around me, but it stops at my skin."

There is something casual and something very real and loveable about Shortbus. Those who are ready for it are invited to become a friend and will be sucked in until they are seriously moved. No doubt, there will be many who will not care to join the ride. Shortbus is definitely not for everyone, but if you dare to relax and open your mind and your heart, you could be very pleasantly surprised. I have never seen a sweeter and more heart-warming movie about sex.


Shortbus
2006

Director: John Cameron Mitchell
Screenwriter: John Cameron Mitchell
Cinematographer: Frank G. DeMarco
Editor: Brian A. Kates
Music by: Yo La Tengo
Cast: Sook-Yin Lee, Paul Dawson, Lindsay Beamish, PJ DeBoy, Raphael Barker