The Wake

Sex—rather startling, graphic, athletic sex—is one of the framing activities of Shortbus, but isn’t really what the movie is about. You don’t have to pay very close attention to realize that John Cameron Mitchell’s slightly surrealistic film is actually about the same old themes that pop up in literature everywhere: love, acceptance, and finding yourself.

Which is not to say that Shortbus doesn’t go after these themes in a funny and surprisingly tender way. The plot intertwines the lives of three couples: Jamie and James (played by PJ DeBoy and Paul Dawson), gay men who are handsome and sweet, even though James is deeply depressed; Sophia and Rob (Sook-Yin Lee and Raphael Barker), a married couple dealing with the irony that, although she is a couples’ therapist, Sophia has never had an orgasm; and Severin (Lindsay Beamish), a punky dominatrix, and her idiot teenage “john.” With characters like that populating and copulating across the screen, you’re tempted either to walk out or stick around and see what happens.

Stick around. The characters soon connect at a place called Shortbus, a fictional salon/sex club in New York. It’s hard to figure out exactly what this place is—it holds rooms for drinking cocktails and rooms filled with people on mattresses having Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Sex. There are quiet nooks where characters visit and have heart to heart conversations, and sometimes there’s a band playing mellow music. There are strange men in strange costumes and a room full of friendly lesbians willing to chat with Sophia about their orgasms. Shortbus the place is interesting and awkward and funny and uncomfortable, all at the same time.

And so is the movie. Mitchell did an open casting call and invited the actors to help develop scenes and scripts, which gives the movie a slightly unpolished quality, which actually adds to the realism of the characters, even while the plot takes absurdly unrealistic turns. The sex is real, and there is a lot of it, but it’s not terribly erotic, which makes you remember that real sex is often awkward and unrehearsed. There are genuinely uncomfortable moments—watching attempted orgasms and an attempted suicide seems invasive, and you want to look away—but then the bus turns a corner, and through more magic realism in plot, everyone ends up safe and accepted.

Shortbus the salon, in a lovely bit of candlelit footage, becomes an intimate concert space, where the gay host sings a soaring cabaret number, accompanied by the friendly lesbians, who now play classical violin. The song rises into an anthem, and everyone feels better.

It’s hard to know who to go see Shortbus with, and not just because it could be embarrassing to watch all that sex with someone. But it’s the humor and sadness and tenderness that grab you and make you think. Shortbus brings up genuine feelings that you might have to talk about—and that could be really embarrassing.