Shortbus (2006)

John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus arrives from 2006, a year when explicit unsimulated sex in an art film still qualified as a provocation. Mitchell cast his ensemble through open auditions, nine actors chosen before a single page of story existed, then spent two and a half years improvising a screenplay out of them. The result is a Brooklyn salon of the same name, a weekly gathering of artists, musicians, and people having sex in rooms with names like Sex-Not-Bombs. It is a film about people trying to touch each other in a city that has stopped making that easy.

The material is overwhelmingly queer and treats that fact as its subject, not its seasoning. A gay couple negotiates an open relationship, a drag artist hosts the proceedings, a dominatrix named Severin works toward a life in art, and the camera does not flinch. Sofia Lin, a sex therapist who has never had an orgasm, anchors the emotional through-line, and her pursuit of pleasure gives the film a feminist pulse, though Mitchell frames it as erotic liberation instead of a thesis. The bodies on screen are varied, unglamorous, and unashamed, which is its own argument, delivered without a podium.

Where the film stays quiet is everywhere else. Race goes unremarked in a multiracial cast. Class and capital never come up. The environment does not exist. History is not revised. Mitchell's stated subject is the loneliness of digital culture, and the film gestures at that theme with a light hand, more shrug than sermon. The title's school-bus metaphor for outsider status gets invoked and then abandoned. The film leaves us with a warm, unruly, occasionally shapeless picture that ends in a blackout, a marching band, and an orgasm, which is a resolution as good as any.