Review of John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus

“It's just like the '60s — except without hope,” says sex salon madam Justin Bond in Shortbus, the new movie written and directed by openly gay actor and filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch). Bond's onscreen statement is meant to describe the atmosphere of the film's namesake, an underground New York City sex salon called Shortbus. But it also sums up the overall mood of the film, which has gained a lot of buzz due to its depiction of real sex, including queer sex.

Similar to Robert Altman's Nashville, the disparate main characters of Shortbus meander through the film mostly powerless in the face of their libidos' mysterious needs. They eventually converge at a circus-like sex salon in Brooklyn called Shortbus. There, amongst hip, open-minded people, they learn to let their hair down and join in on all the “free love” that life has to offer.

As explained on the film's website, the film's title “refers to the traditional American yellow school bus. Most ‘normal' kids rode in the long yellow bus. Children with ‘special needs' — the disabled, the emotionally-disturbed, the abnormally gifted — rode the shorter yellow bus, because there weren't so many of them.”

The special needs of Shortbus' characters involve their sexual and emotional hang-ups; they have reached young adulthood sexually incomplete, and because their sex drives are out of kilter, they are also out of kilter. In other words, none of them are satisfied with their sex lives, and through the course of the film, we follow them on their quests for sexual happiness.

James (Paul Dawson) seeks to improve his relationship with his boyfriend Jamie (P.J. DeBoy) by experimenting with threesomes. Young, free spirit Ceth (Jay Brannan) becomes their therapeutic third. Loner and voyeur Caleb (Peter Stickles) spies on and then stalks the threesome.

In a different part of the city, Sofia (Sook-Yin Lee) is a sex therapist who has never achieved an orgasm herself; Rob (Raphael Barker) is her sexually insecure boyfriend. Another story line involves Severin (Lindsay Beamish), a dominatrix who can't connect emotionally with anyone. Jesse (Adam Hardman) is her regular, immature, “trust fund hipster,” masochistic client.

The ongoing sex-capades at the Shortbus salon are hosted by gay performance artist Justin Bond (aka Kiki from the Broadway musical Kiki and Herb). Bond plays himself (in drag) in Shortbus, and he conducts his polysexual parties as if he were a cross between Gypsy Rose Lee and Auntie Mame. Possessed of an old-fashioned, matronly charm, he is all sighing smiles and lilting phrases. One expects at any moment he'll utter, “Circulate, dahlings, circulate!”

Shortbus is a film made by and about bohemian, nonconformist libertines for an audience of the same. Beneath its simple tale of sexually unsatisfied people lies its deeper message: Current conservative trends in American society are stifling to artistic, intellectual and sexual creativity.

By including real, graphic sex acts in his film, Mitchell is using pornography to make a political statement. “I see an increasing prudishness in American cinema,” he states in the film's program notes. At the recent Cannes Film Festival, Mitchell called his film “a call to arms to moviegoers who are fed up with the current climate of morality and censorship in American society.”