Shortbus (2006)

The most 2006 thing about this film is when the Twee Marching Band shows up to the orgy.

John Cameron Mitchell’s 2006 film arrived wearing its provocation on its sleeve, all those unsimulated sex scenes that got it banned in various countries and drew a certain kind of curious viewer, myself included, in under slightly false pretenses. You come for the notoriety. You stay because the movie turns out to be one of the warmest things imaginable, a scruffy, semi-improvised love letter to post-9/11 New York disguised as a dirty movie.

Mitchell’s real subject is permeability, the terror of letting anyone in, staged through a handful of lost New Yorkers who orbit a Brooklyn salon that is part art space, part group therapy, part pansexual free-for-all. Sofia is a couples counselor who has never had an orgasm. James and Jamie are trying to survive opening their relationship. Everyone here is trying to fuck their way toward a connection they don’t quite know how to make with words, and Mitchell shoots the sex not to titillate but to tell you who these people are.

What moved me most, and what I keep coming back to in these films, is that nobody pays in blood for the pleasure they chase. That is still shockingly rare, a queer movie where desire leads toward life instead of punishment. This one is about surviving, thriving, and figuring out who you are, and it means all three. It’s also very funny, gawky and generous in the way only mid-2000s digital indies could be, right up through a finale where a citywide blackout and, yes, a full marching band turn an orgy into something close to a benediction.

I have a soft spot for these movies, the low-budget early-digital ones brave enough to talk about sex like it matters. Shortbus is the best of them. Come for the rumors. Stay for the marching band.

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