« Book Meme | Main | Shortbus, pt. 2 »

October 13, 2006

Shortbus, pt. 1

The thing that strikes me the most about John Cameron Mitchell's work - and, with both Hedwig And The Angry Inch and Shortbus under his belt, I think it's safe to call it a personal trademark - is the way he manages to intertwine humor and pathos into a single, indistinguishable dramatic sensibility. Tangentially, this includes joyous anger, nihilistic hope and other precarious emotional states; watching his films, I don't have to chose between laughing and crying - I have to figure out how to do both simultaneously.

This fugue of feeling prevails over Shortbus's shortcomings. This new film isn't as singular a project as Hedwig, nor is it as strong, but its caustic goodwill and bohemian bombast has a genuinely magical effect. It eases the film's considerable rough points, and turns an ending that I think is, on a literal level, rather meaningless into the most emotively meaningful thing in the world. It is a blast of orgiastic gorgeousness - I would say dionysian, except that term suggests a physical predominance, and for all the sex he's crammed into it Mitchell never lets the plumbing overshadow his picture's heart.

The film has two primary storylines - that of a couples therapist who's never had an orgasm and a gay couple who hope that opening up their relationship might solve its problems - and a handful of ancillary subplots that all intersect at the titular salon on a fairly regular basis. The film is at it's best once it gets past what little exposition it has to deal with (which, nonetheless, is handled with conspicuous clunkiness) and starts operating in a more freeflowing form. This doesn't mean that there's suddenly more sex; in fact, the explicit content is mostly confined to the film's first half. Mitchell uses it as a platform and an introduction, but its not a deux ex machina. I was afraid he would present sex as a one-stop solution; thanfully, the film, thankfully, doesn't suggest that sex solves everything. It just helps. Sometimes.

I noted two interesting things about the sexual content in the film. The first is that Mitchell shows everything except male intercourse (even Brokeback Mountain was more graphic in that regard), rendering it both the one unbroken taboo in semi-mainstream cinema and suggesting that, perhaps, it's the one personal line Mitchell doesn't feel comfortable crossing. The second is that, unsurprisingly, the only staged sex scene is also the only one that's at all sensual. It is perhaps inadvertent commentary on the nature of eroticism that it takes an absence of gratutity (plus careful lighting and artful composition) to add an emotional depth to what is elsewhere in the film just a bunch of (often comical) bumping and grinding.

Mitchell has used New York not just as a setting but as an adjective in describing the film; I'm not quite sure how to explain how that makes sense - perhaps it's the Gondry-esque cityscape that serves as binding to the film's episodes - but it really does. There's a genuine post 9-11 feeling to it, as well, and not because of trite references to it in the dialogue (there are a few of those) or the subtle, effecting glimpses of ground zero in those CGI interludes; there's an anticipatory edge to the film, a feeling that the ground could drop out at any moment. The film even has its own minor disaster in it - a citywide electrical shortage serves as a sort of backbone to the story, and it culminates in a literally orgasmic blackout. A lesser film might have been content to end there, but doing so would be mistaking excess for satisfaction and neglecting the importance of the aftermath. Its a moment of oddly irreovcable loss, but also of comfort; Mitchell does his thing and spins them both together. And then he moves on.

* * *

The soundtrack of the film has yet to be released, but one of the tracks, Boys Of Harmony by the Hidden Cameras, has been in pretty constant rotation on my iTunes. It reminds me of all the best parts of the movie. It's the song that scores the film's first teaser - viewable at the official site, along with the more explicit full teaser

Posted by David Lowery at October 13, 2006 02:12 AM

Comments

Posted by: Paul Martin at October 26, 2006 07:54 AM