'Shortbus' review

John Cameron Mitchell's sophomore film falls a bit short of expectations

By Mairead Case
Published: November 9th, 2006 | 9:07pm

Three years ago, I interviewed John Cameron Mitchell. He was tiny, with bright eyes, and I was embarrassed about the Dalmatian stickers on my tape recorder. Mostly, we talked about Hedwig, his 2001 musical about a transsexual rock star searching for her other half. But Mitchell did mention that he was "filming a love letter" to New York and sex. He called it Shortbus, after the bus that the "gifted and challenged students" have to ride.

Three years later, that--sex and New York --is exactly what Mitchell's done, and I'm conflicted about the result. On the one hand, Shortbus shows--celebrates, even--certain kinds of sex that the mainstream media tends to ignore or stigmatize, which is maybe worse. There's cellulite in Shortbus, also arm-scars, pot, Paxil, and ungraceful orgasms, plus teenage boys who nibble a corn chip and put the other half back. Add one teary, sincere apology from an unidentified politician (he's probably Ed Koch, and if you don't know who that is, read Kushner), and Mitchell might have done more than enough.

But I wanted him to do more than more than enough. It's great to see all kinds of sex and love and fear onscreen, but Mitchell never really says anything but "hop on the short bus! Face your fears!" If he was a first-time filmmaker (or a twenty-year-old), I'd buy these lines, wholesale, but I expected more of a thesis from someone as savvy as Mitchell. Say what you will about academic snootiness, but even camp is better when it's part of a canon. Put another way, there's a scene in Hedwig where a boy lies in his mother's oven, eating tomatoes and listening to Bowie. "Those artists," he says, "they left as deep an impression on me as the oven rack did on my face."

Plus--yay sex! yay New York!--those are the same points Mitchell made three years ago. And isn't your vision supposed to grow--at least a smidge--from start-to-finish? There are a lot of growing penises in Shortbus, and I kinda wish that Mitchell had cut one of them, Hedwig-style, and let the blood rush through his plot instead.

Is this fair of me--a 23-year-old white woman who makes out with guys--to say? Maybe, maybe not. Plus, ensemble pieces don't necessarily need a plot, and Mitchell did make an entire movie with only $2 million and surprisingly few jump cuts. So maybe I'm privileged and ungrateful and ignorant, but whatever. I wanted more.

Let's rewind a bit. In 2003, Mitchell posted an open casting call. Everyone, star or not, was invited, and anyone who was interested had to make a short video describing "an emotional sexual experience." 500 people responded, and Mitchell cast a core ensemble of seven (including Sook-Yin Lee, who you might recognize as Kwahng-Yi, one of Hedwig's Korean housewives). After the actors had committed to the film, they--and Mitchell, too--embarked on a three-year period of improv, exploration and breakdown. They wrote the script together, and then they filmed it.

Basically, Shortbus is the fictionalized account of that time. The characters, who range from a sex therapist to a former hustler, come to the Shortbus salon for transcendence and brownies and a fuck. While they do, Mitchell shows off his fabulous friends, including Bitch, Yo La Tengo, and the Wau Wau Sisters. I liked seeing Le Tigre's J.D. Samson as big as Tomkat and Brangelina usually are, but none of these people are really written into the script, so their scenes felt too much like watching the cool kids in the cafeteria. Of course, nobody in my cafeteria had a blue-glitter-donut-hat, but you get the point.

For all its messy, sexy glory, Shortbus is ultimately about loneliness--why you are, if you like it, how to stop. There's a lot of bangs and whangs, but some of the best moments are tiny and intimate, like when Severin (a dominatrix played by Lindsay Beamish), finishes a session and lugs all the equipment to her storage locker, by herself and in spiky heels. She's schlepping, and she's cleaning up after sex. Seeing that felt great, because the media usually tells us that dominatrixes are plastic-romantic, and that sex is unsticky.

All of these moments, and some of the banging ones, raise important questions: Is voyeurism participation? Can you be a vegan and a cocksucker? But Mitchell never tries to answer them, so Shortbus often feels like nothing more than a never-ending game of Never Have I Ever. That, or a man fellating himself, which James, played by Paul Dawson, actually does. (Dawson did it in one take, then had to do two more because the cameras kept fritzing.)

Mitchell nods to Cassavettes, Plato, and the Marquis de Sade, plus a few to Tarnation's Jordan Caouette, which is admirable because he's a lot younger than Mitchell is. But these are all in name only, so you feel like Mitchell's handing you a reading list, instead of saying why he cares about these things so much. That's fine, but then he needs to stop praising Plato, who was pro-inquiry but also believed in mentors and conclusion (if you don't believe me, read The Symposium, and choose the Shelley translation because it's sexier.)

Mitchell recycles a few points from Hedwig, too. Both Hedwig and Shortbus have puppet- or animation-based dream sequences, women with mechanized body parts, and lotsa Plato. At times, this feels disappointingly like trying to create a personal aesthetic with a crowbar. And Mitchell's few original metaphors are painfully overwrought: ejaculation blending into a Pollackesque spatter-painting, for example, also rebellious apples and impermeable membranes.

Worst of all, if inevitably, Shortbus is so big on the "we're all on one big freaky team, but because we're all on it, we're not actually freaks" thing that it's easy for forget that Mitchell couldn't impossibly include everyone. There really aren't any female role models in Shortbus (except for Kiki and Herb's fabulous Justin Bond, but he's actually a dude), and it frustrated me that even Mitchell could perpetuate the frigid-hetero-careerist-bitchwoman thing, whether he's doing it consciously or not.

Complaints made, I'm still glad that I spent eight bucks on Shortbus, which says a lot when you're twenty-three and drifting. And I suppose I can be forgiven for idolizing Mitchell so intensely that I thought he'd skip the second-album curse. There'’s always the next movie, right? I'll still be first in line.