Sexual Healing

Part of what made Hedwig, as played by Mitchell himself, so compelling a character was the way that (s)he buried his/her psychosexual anguish in a torrent of self-deprecating sarcasm. The Shortbus ensemble, all of whom collaborated in the writing process via improvisation, is a much needier and more drearily confessional lot. ("Welcome to Lifetime Television," one bit player mockingly intones during an encounter session, but it's too accurate to be very funny.) James and Jamie (Paul Dawson and PJ DeBoy) are a gay couple whose relationship has become a little shaky, perhaps because the former is perpetually morose while the latter sports a unchanging expression of simian confusion. Seeking to energize things by adding a third party, they first consult with a sex therapist, Sofia (Canadian TV personality Sook-Yin Lee), who reveals in their first session that she herself is incapable of having an orgasm. If you can swallow that contrivance, you may also be able to roll with Severin (Lindsay Beamish), the angry, eyebrow-free dominatrix who's really, yes, just a lost little girl deep down inside. All of these damaged souls converge at the Brooklyn salon-cum-orgy known as Shortbus, where no problem is so intractable that you can't eventually shag your way free of it.

For the most part, Mitchell does right by the numerous sex scenes, which run the gamut from hilarious to romantic to mournful. Shortbus captures the goofy desperation of couples who attempt to exhaust the entire Kama Sutra in a single afternoon; it acknowledges that there's something inherently silly about burying your face in someone else's ass. Mitchell is also well aware that there are times when having another person rubbing and grinding against you can be the loneliest feeling in the world. If the movie's worldview can sometimes be distractingly queer—even straight Sofia, who protests that she's "not sure [she's] wired that way," eventually hooks up with two other women—it's also refreshingly candid. The Brown Bunny's notorious climactic blowjob felt like an act of narcissistic provocation; Shortbus, by contrast, establishes its genital intimacy from the get-go, with a shot of James first contemplating his own flaccid penis in the bathtub and then, um, contemplating it from a much closer angle. By the time we see unsimulated intercourse, it seems as casual and unthreatening as a massage.

Unfortunately, James also opens his mouth to speak. Shortbus isn't porn, but if there's one thing we've learned from that world, it's that people who are willing to expose themselves sexually for the camera tend not to possess the emotional reserves required for credible acting. The men, in particular, seem to have been cast primarily for their hunkiness and lack of inhibition: Dawson milks the same doleful-puppy mien throughout, while DeBoy comes across like Bill Paxton's mildly retarded younger brother. Still, even your Streeps and Pacinos would struggle with this film's baldly therapeutic sensibility, which entails everybody constantly voicing their innermost thoughts rather than working overtime to conceal them, as in drama and, well, life. Explicitly set in post-9/11 New York, Shortbus was clearly intended as part of the healing process, but true art achieves its catharsis via body blows, not bear hugs.