Digital Valentine's Day Favorites, Part 4: Shortbus

"Sex is a beautiful thing between two people. Between five it's fantastic." -- Woody Allen

Happy Valentine's Day from Film.com! We love you ... truly, madly, deeply.

This week we've been featuring DVDs we recommend for the holiday. Yeah, it's a bogus made-up holiday run by a big East Coast syndicate. But behind the overpriced cards, waxy chocolates, clichéd flowers, and those little heart-shaped antacids with cutesy sentiments engraved on them, we here at Film.com really dig the whole love thing. The longings of the heart have inspired more cinema than any other human endeavor -- from Valentino to Bogie and Bacall, Scarlett O'Hara to Jack and Ennis.

For today's film we chose to think way outside the red-ribboned Godiva box. This modern indie reminds us that love comes in boxes of all shapes, and it's an emphatically "big tent" finale to this year's Digital Valentine's Day film fest.

Digital Valentine's Day No. 1: Charlie Chaplin's City Lights

Digital Valentine's Day No. 2: The Philadelphia Story

Digital Valentine's Day No. 3: Singin' in the Rain

Digital Valentine's Day No. 4: Shortbus

First, let's say what Shortbus is. Directed by John Cameron Mitchell (as his follow-up to Hedwig and the Angry Inch), Shortbus is a light indie romantic comedy-drama confection. It played the metropolitan and festival circuits in 2006, premiering at Cannes and headlining at the Toronto Film Festival, the 50th annual London Film Festival, and so on. It's an Altmanesque, Fellini-lite study of interweaving New York couples, singles, and various diversities, all dealing with their romantic-sexual concerns and the human need for connection and community. ("...in post-9/11 America," adds the already trite clip-on descriptor. Shortbus does tilt in that direction, especially in its opening scene overlooking Ground Zero, but as usual there's little here that wasn't true pre-9/11 too.)

Shortbus is engagingly crafted with a pleasing ensemble of newbie actors. It's an observant, comedic pop charmer about relationships -- relationships with long-time companions and new encounters, with families of choice, and with oneself. It is big-hearted, soft-spoken, and often really funny.

Now, what Shortbus is not. It is not "art-house porn." It's not pornographic in any sleazy sense. That's important to note about a film that integrates scenes of authentic, explicit, see-it-all, holy smokes, "WTF?!", non-simulated sex. That sex springs from copious points across the adjust-to-fit sexuality continuum: het and gay and bi, married and un-, polyamorous and polymorphous, kinky and kinkless, electrically aided (the closing credits list a "vibrator consultant"), solo, duo, trio, and orchestral. We witness more tattoos than taboos here.

These sex scenes aim not to exploit or arouse, but to simply be. To be truthful, friendly, romantic, honest, joyful, and purposeful. Shortbus is not "shocking" for shock's sake, although some initial discomfort is part of Mitchell's benignly subversive contract with us; its payoff comes the moment we notice that the discomfort evaporates under the light of the film's more disarming hearts-and-minds sensibilities. Shortbus is not, above all, "dirty." What it is, in fact, is a nice movie, one of the nicest to come down the pike since March of the Penguins.

Pulling together Shortbus' multiple threads is Sophia (Sook-Yin Lee), a happily married sex therapist ("I prefer 'couples counselor'") who has never herself experienced the "elusive" female orgasm ("I think maybe it's mythical, like the Loch Ness Monster"). Her newest clients are a monogamous young gay couple: a former TV child star named Jamie (PJ DeBoy) and an ex-street hustler James (Paul Dawson). James wants to bring other men into their relationship, although his own depression points to a more tragic ulterior motive.

They invite Sofia to Shortbus, a Brooklyn "salon for the gifted and challenged" where adults of all ages and predispositions gather to connect through conversation, music, art, play, and sex. "It's just like the '60s, only with less hope. See anything you like?" says Shortbus' host/sensei Justin (Justin Bond of the alt-cabaret duo Kiki & Herb). Justin's role as Shortbus' father confessor is leavened by his been-there, so-done-that air of affected cynicism. "As my dear departed friend Lotus Weinstock used to say," he epigrams like an eye-linered Oscar Wilde, "I used to want to change the world. Now I just wanna leave the room with a little dignity."

At Shortbus "the Jamies" meet an attractive model and singer-songwriter, Ceth (pronounced "Seth," played by Jay Brannon), who joins them as a possible new partner. However, a voyeuristic photographer (Peter Stickle) who has been secretly watching the Jamies voices his own objections to that. Sophia finds counsel in Severin (Lindsay Beamish), a spike-haired dominatrix with troubles of her own.

As stories unfold -- everyone gets his or her Vagina Monologues moment -- shared fears and vulnerabilities intermix and collide. There's poignancy -- including an elderly gentleman, known only as "the ex-Mayor of New York," wistful about his lost youth represented by those around him -- and comic bits involving a Jackson Pollack painting, a matchmaking BlackBerry called the Yenta650, and a vibrating egg with an unpredictable remote control. All the while, New York City's power grid experiences brownouts that appear connected to the energies discharging among the characters. This stylized, candy-colorful CGI New York cityscape, which frames the goings-on, reminds us that we're being invited into Shortbus' heightened reality, an electric-hued fantasy that exists the width of one dental dam away from our own.

The score's nearly wall-to-wall music includes Yo La Tengo, Azure Ray, and Mitchell's onscreen friends from the New York scene. There's also a marching band and -- a scene everyone talks about -- a proctological rendition of the "Star-Spangled Banner."

What makes Shortbus something other than just an experiment in mainstreaming hardcore prurience is that it's as affectionate as it is licentious. Mitchell and his cast break through the skin with humor and tenderly staged revelations, and this emotionally engaging film treats its screwed-up "special needs" busriders with genuine warmth of feeling.

We could wish that Mitchell's bravado extended further into portions of Shortbus' script, which he developed over more than two and a half years in collaborative improv workshops with his cast. Key elements come off as pat or banal. The arc of Sophia's ironic plight, James' suicidal YouTubed melancholy, Severin's goth-eyed angst.... These are old hooks to hang the movie's boxers and bustiers on.

Yet the whole exceeds the sum of its occasionally shopworn parts. While we could ask for greater original zazz in its characters, and the Magnolia-redolent climax succumbs to more than one trite-and-true impulse, Shortbus does it all with an affirming, feel-good, kumbaya objective. In deliberate opposition to the spate of Euro-gloom art-house films that also used real sex (Baise Moi, the appropriately titled Anatomy of Hell, etc.), Mitchell's happy ending doesn't tumble his progressive pilgrims into an emotional abyss or leave them run over by some metaphorical truck as punishment for imagined "sins."

There's nothing in his vision that's mean-spirited, cruel, or hurtful. Nor does he step into the easy trap of condescension or dismissiveness toward all those potential viewers whose personal comfort zones aren't even on the same continent as Shortbus. For all its no-brow outrageousness, Shortbus strives for an amiable, thoughtful, respectful resonance that's in short supply both in and out of the cineplex.

Shortbus was greeted warmly at Cannes. At the midnight premiere, a crowd of 2,300 gave it a standing ovation. Legitimate North American distributors fought over the right to distribute it, despite the inevitable push-back from U.S. censors. All the same, Mitchell makes sure you're fully informed what plane he's working on within the first six fluid-flying minutes, and it's a plane that (boy howdy!) guaranteed Shortbus would generate controversy and rattle cages. Sook-Yin Lee -- who hosts a radio program on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation -- was almost fired because of her participation in Shortbus. But it didn't take long for the CBC to relent in the face of support for Lee from the public, including R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe and Francis Ford Coppola. Screen International, a trade publication, called her "a real revelation" and praised her "deft comic timing" and "gritty emotional intensity."

Saying that Shortbus "isn't for everyone" belabors an obviousness that applies to every movie ever made. It's fairer to say that fans of, say, Nerve.com or writer Dan Savage are already tuned into Shortbus' vibe.

Still, Mitchell is more inclusive even than that, and Shortbus' "we're all in this together" compassion becomes an open invitation in the most catholic sense. It's no accident that Shortbus opens with a close-up on the Statue of Liberty. In its stand against fear and fatalism, and its unselfconscious embrace of constitutional freedoms and the life, liberty, pursuit-of-happiness ethic, what Shortbus is, in fact, is one of the most decent, moral, and American of movies.

About the DVD:

Velocity/THINKFilm's DVD release of Shortbus presents a flawless image (1.78:1, anamorphic) with DD 5.1 and 2.0 stereo audio options.

The relaxed scene-specific commentary comes from Mitchell, Justin Bond, Sook-Yin Lee, Paul Dawson, and PJ DeBoy as they reminisce about the scenes and other cast members, revealing the processes and improvisational moments that helped shape the final product.

A Sundance Channel behind-the-scenes featurette, "Gifted and Talented: The Making of Shortbus" (30 min.), brings us Mitchell and his cast chronicling the production from the unusually frank auditions to the group workshopping and principal shooting. It concludes with home-movie footage of the cast during the invitational premiere at Cannes and other festivals.

"How to Shoot Sex: A Docu-Primer" (8 min.), with optional (and recommended) commentary from Mitchell and Lee, collects some unique behind-the-scenes considerations required for the bountifully populated big-loft-full-of-sex scene. Shanti Carson, a heartstartingly lovely real-life fire-eater and clothing designer (with an awesome holstered ray gun tattooed on her thigh), is aptly lauded for her presence here.

We also get eight deleted/extended scenes with optional commentary from Mitchell and the cast, plus the film's various trailers.

When you load the disc, it frontloads the eight-minute THINKFilm trailer gallery before the main menu. The gallery is also accessible from the Special Features list, so press "Menu" to skip it.

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