Thursday, October 05, 2006
Review: Shortbus
You may have heard about this new movie opening in the major population centers of the United States today. It's called Shortbus, and it's the second feature directed by John Cameron Mitchell, who made what I consider to be the best film of this very young century, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, five years ago. And it's about sex. Lots of sex. Gay, straight, bi, solo, group, and whatever other combination you can think of. This, of course, raises a lot of questions. Hopefully, this review will answer some of those questions.
Q: So why is a film about sex called Shortbus?
A: Shortbus, in the film, is the name of an underground sex club in New York City, so called because it's for "the gifted and the challenged," as the proprietor says.
Q: So, can we expect to see a few guys who are, um, gifted?
A: Well, most of the characters fall more in the challenged category. As in, a female sex counselor who has never had an orgasm, or a dominatrix who can't form a meaningful relationship, or a gay couple who seem too cold and too clingy, respectively.
Q: So this is a movie with real sex in it. Sounds like a gimmick.
A: I don't know what people are going to end up thinking about this movie, or whether most people that see it will like it, but the one thing I can say for certain is that the sex does not come off as a "gimmick." The sex doesn't distract from the story, because the sex IS the story. There's just no way around it. This is a movie about sex.
Q: I think seeing real, explicit sex on screen would pull me out of the story.
A: Mitchell, intentionally or not, seems to have come up with a good strategy to prevent that from happening. The first 15 or 20 minutes of the movie are pretty much a nonstop barrage of wild, energetic sex. After that, it settles down into the characters, and although there's a lot of sex going on, either in the foreground or the background, the audience is a bit desensitized to it.
Q: So this film's pretty hot, huh?
A: You know...That's not what I felt. Not that the sex isn't hot, but I didn't leave the theater thinking "that was a sexy film." Funny, touching, exhilarating, fulfilling, but it didn't really arouse me sexually. I'm not sure why this is, but my educated guess is that porn is generally removed from reality. Characters exist as nothing but walking ids and abstract fantasies. In Shortbus, you're watching actual people have sex, and you can't objectify them into masturbatory fantasies as easily as you can in porn, or in most Hollywood movies, for that matter.
Q: Is sex used as a metaphor then?
A: If sex is a metaphor in Shortbus, it stands for the same thing it stands for in the emotional lives of most people: acceptance from or connection with another human being. And sexual disfunction stands for being unable to make those connections.
Q: Is it as good as Hedwig?
A: Well, no. But then, it's a little unfair to make the comparison. It's not a rock opera, for one thing (although there is a lot of music in it, and quite a bit of it is performed by the actors/characters), and Mitchell doesn't have Stephen Trask writing songs for him, or Emily Hubley's animation. Then again, Hedwig doesn't have live sex, so maybe it's a wash. But what's mostly missing is the unified field of symbolic imagery that flowed through Hedwig: the image of cracks shaped like lightning bolts shaped like figures lying on a bed, the image of a wall dividing a city, people divided from each other, and so on. Shortbus does have these unified images, mostly of blackouts and powersurges, with a little bit of bus imagery thrown in, but they don't dominate the movie the way they did in Hedwig.
Q: So this is a completely different movie?
A: The two films share quite a bit, actually. Certainly the theme of sexually/emotionally disfunctional characters struggling to connect with each other is central to both works, and one of the climactic scenes, of two estranged lovers staring into each others eyes, feels very familiar. And as I mentioned before, there is a lot of music performed in the film. In particular, the showstopper number, "We All Get it in the End," performed Justin Bond (a flamboyant amalgam of Joel Grey's character from Cabaret and Z-Man from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls), brings the film to such a rousing ending that you might accuse Mitchell of leaning on the Hedwig crutch if you weren't so utterly exhilarated by what you were seeing and hearing.
Q: Is this the best film about sex you've ever seen?
A: I'll tell you this: it's one of the best films about NYC I've ever seen, right up there with Manhattan, Taxi Driver, Do the Right Thing, and whatever else you want to put in there. It uses the geography of Manhattan constantly, and leaves you with the impression of that mythical city where young urban professionals by day go to bohemian sex clubs hidden in downtown industrial buildings by night. The awareness of 9/11, the blackouts and brownouts, even the Reagan-era mayor looking for forgiveness for his inaction during the Aids crisis, seem to rise organically out of the streets of New York.
It's also certainly one of the funniest films about sex ever made. In some ways, the film it most reminded me of was Woody Allen's Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask. Like Allen, Mitchell understands what's funny about sex. But where Allen's films are all narcissistically introspective, Mitchell's films are about interpersonal connections. This is a film about the anxiety of relating to another human, as are Woody Allen's films, but whereas Allen is constantly in retreat from meaningful relationships, Mitchell is trying for resolution. In a Men Are From Mars... sense, Mitchell is a much more feminine storyteller.
Q: So how controversial will this movie be?
A: Good question. I imagine it's so far off the radar that most moral crusaders won't even notice it. But I have to admit, I can't stop thinking about the reaction of Fallwell and Dobson if they were to see three gay men having sex while singing The Star Spangled Banner (complete with Hendrix-like wah wah effects created by pulling one's mouth in and out of an asshole).
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Excellent review.
...AND we're getting it next week! So, no having to choose between this and The Departed.