FILM REVIEW
– SHORTBUS (2006)
An extra-ordinary intelligent and well-scripted heavily
improvised comedy-drama film about sex that uses hardcore real penetrational
sex of a kind only usually seen in flat pornography films.
I first heard of Shortbus when it was reviewed in Scarlet
Magazine http://www.scarletmagazine.co.uk/
(for which I have occasionally written). The rave review and Scarlet Award made
me eager to see the film, made by Hedwig & The Angry Inch director John
Cameron Mitchell. The title refers to the fact that special colleges have
smaller buses than the regular schools that have long buses. Much of the film
plays on the pre-occupation with sexual variety and the need for sex therapy as
an exclusively middle class preoccupation. The film opens in a sex therapy
office overlooking the crater left by the 9/11 destruction of The World Trade
Centre.
The film tells the stories of several characters that are
drawn to the Shortbus Club where orgies, candid sex talk, drugs and avant-garde
films are fully indulged. Initially, it all seems delightfully hedonistic, but
as the film progresses it becomes more apparent that the characters feel empty
inside. As a very jaded transvestite played by Justin Bond, as himself,
observes while watching a mass orgy, “It’s just like the 60’s, with less hope.”
The character also has the line “"As
my dear, departed friend Lotus Weinstock used to say, I once wanted to
change the World. Now I just want to leave the room with a little dignity.”
Weinstock was apparently the last lover for Lenny Bruce, and a friend of
Bond’s.
Another memorable character is the elderly voyeuristic
former New York Mayor Tobias is based on a real mayor, Ed Koch who was believed
to have been highly promiscuous. Tobias admits to one of the gay characters
that he himself is a closeted homosexual who now regrets leaving it too late to
come out in the open and experience gay love. The two men share a tender hug
and kiss.
Sook Yin Lee, the main character, is a sex therapist that
has a problem of her own – she has never experienced true orgasm. She has a
monogamous marriage to a complete slob of a boyfriend who often neglects her
for cyber-porn.
When a gay male couple come to her because one of the men is
a depressive, she get angry enough to slap one of them, and they invite her to
The Shortbus Club. The gay guys have problems of their own one of them, working
as a life-guard, has been shocked by the drowning of an old man at the pool. He
is now slowly making his own suicide film to leave as a legacy to his boyfriend
as well as attempting extreme yoga in order to fellate himself. When he tries
to take his own life at the Jacuzzi pool he is saved by his own stalker, Caleb,
who admires him from afar to that point. Caleb describes his job as
proof0reading, though in deleted scenes in the extras he has a whole sub plot
in which he is a CIA operative assigned to looking after the daughters of the
US President. There are many highly subversive scenes - in one, during a gay
sex romp, the American National Anthem is sung into a man's anus.
After listening to Bitch and other ladies from the club’s
resident musicians, Yin Lee tries an experiment in which she wears a remote
controlled vibrating egg within her vagina, which her husband has the remote
control for. They both wonder round the club, and the husband is expected to
use the vibrator controls to arouse her whenever he wishes. Yin Lee is flirting
with Justin Bond when it first goes off. She then tries to make love to the
dominatrix girl, and when the egg goes off again, the dominatrix gets an orgasm
from it, but Yin Lee does not. Yin Lee
now finds out that her husband has tired of the remote control and left it for
use by anyone who finds it in the club. The Dominatrix now seduces Yin Lee’s
husband in order to punish him for failing to take care of Yin Lee’s needs.
Yin Lee has a strange dream in which she masturbates on a
deserted beach – still unable to achieve orgasm, she screams and the scream, in
the real World, knocks out all the lights in New York.
In the blackout everyone goes to the Shortbus Club, where
Justin Bond sings what begins as a touching bittersweet torch song, with the
refrain ‘You always get it in the end’ which could refer to sex, orgasms, love
or death’. The orgy in the club seems to become tender and genuinely
affectionate, and then the tempo changes as the song is gatecrashed by a
marching band, despite the restricted space – the band is called The Hungry
March Band, and the orgy increases in pace and affection in tune with them –
even Yin Lee achieves orgasm now and as she does, the film ends on a very
beautiful note of love and melody in perfect union.
Other characters include a dominatrix, who has no real
understanding of other people at all,
Bitch, and burlesque entertainer, The World Famous Bob, like
Bond, are both playing themselves. The DVD comes with some of the best extras
and deleted scenes available on any feature presentation.
LINKS – Shortbus on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortbus
© Copyright. Arthur
Chappell
LINK TO THIS PAGE http://arthurchappell.me.uk/film.review-shortbus.htm
LINKS TO OTHER PEOPLES PAGES E-mail arthur@chappell7300.freeserve.co.uk
UPDATES MYSPACE - http://www.myspace.com/arthurchappell
FACEBOOK - http://profile.to/arthurchappell/
FACEBOOK BLOG http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blogpage.php?blogid=85623
MY BOOKS - http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=952521