Toggle navigation Menu. Shortbus is primarily significant for the exact reason I feared the most: it proves that director John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch was an accident.
That shouldn't be surprising: Hedwig was a gift-wrapped present of stylistic possibilities. Still, that style came from somewhere in the filmmaker's mind, and it's shocking - nay, it verges on insulting - that Mitchell's three-years-in-the-making sophomore effort should turn out so inert. If you know one thing about Shortbus , you know that it's the film with explicit sex scenes that isn't a porno. And for that, Mitchell deserves praise: American cinema has a well-documented fear of sex, and the much more libertine European cinema tends to depict sex as an act that people who despise each other engage in without any trace of pleasure.
So a film that stands up and says, "sex is a fun thing that brings people together! Although this film is actually saying, "sex is a fun thing that gives hopelessly depressed people something to do with their useless lives! Tragically, cinema is not an undergraduate psych theory class, and if good intentions were all that it took to make a good film, All the King's Men would be the best picture of Good films come from things like a significant and consistent visual language and well-expressed characters, and these are not the qualities of Shortbus.
The film revolves around four characters: Sofia Sook-yin Lee , the pre-orgasmic sex therapist or as she annoyingly insists like five time, "couples counselor" trapped in a hyperneurotic marriage; James and Jamie Paul Dawson and PJ DeBoy , her gay patients who aren't sure about the status of their relationship; and Severin Lindsay Beamish , a dominatrix who doesn't like other human beings. Severin is awesome, because as the film progresses, she doesn't ever start to like other human beings, and given that she lives in the world of this film, she should not.
Other people circle this core, looking for emotional connection and sex. They all find it at Shortbus, a sex salon operated by Justin Bond as "Justin Bond," in the film's only good performance.
