There is a scene in Shortbus of unsimulated sex between three gay men that ends with them singing the American national anthem into each other’s bottoms. Let me say straightaway that I will defend to the death a gay man’s right to sing this, or any other song, into another man’s bottom. The thing is, I just don’t want to see them doing it in films. Nor do I want to see any of the numerous other acts of explicit sex, gay or straight, shown in this film, thank you very much.

To take such a position leads inevitably to you being condemned as prudish. But it’s actually those champions of sexual explicitness in mainstream cinema who are anti-sex. It is a curious paradox that as mainstream cinema gets more and more sexually explicit, so films become less sexy. The writer and director John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus has it all: oral sex, self-sex, gay sex, group sex, straight sex, sadistic sex, voyeuristic sex, bottom-singing sex and just old-fashioned face-to-face sex. Yes, it’s everywhere — and there’s not a drop of sexiness to be seen anywhere on the screen.

By contrast, censorship — in the form of certification — has produced greater erotic movie moments than all the explicit mainstream films in our era of liberalisation put together. Compare the score card: earlier days of “repression” gave us Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now and Harvey Keitel putting a finger in the hole in Holly Hunter’s stocking in The Piano. Liberation has produced such forgettable feasts of fornication as Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs and Chloë Sevigny with a mouthful of Vincent Gallo in The Brown Bunny.

Now along comes Shortbus, and the erotic envelope of mainstream cinema hasn’t been pushed, it has been shredded. It is a comic and hard-core look at the emotional and carnal longings of a group of post-9/11 New Yorkers. There’s Sofia (Sook-Yin Lee), a sex therapist who is unable to have an orgasm with her husband, Rob (Raphael Barker). She is visited by two gay men, James (Paul Dawson) and Jamie

(PJ DeBoy), who are thinking of opening their relationship to other lovers. When they discover Sofia’s orgasm problem, they invite her down to Shortbus — a place that is equal parts literary salon, cabaret, nightclub and sex club. “It’s like the Sixties, but without the hope,” says one of the club’s leading figures. Here, Sofia encounters a whole underworld of polymorphous perversity — transsexuals, lesbians, performance artists, voyeurs and exhibitionists — and begins her search for the holy grail of modern times, the female orgasm.

Mitchell is smart enough to know that the main trouble with sexually explicit films is that they are so humourless. He has tried to make a kind of art-house Sex and the City for the age of internet porn, and there are plenty of laughs to be had. The film pokes fun at the psychobabble and new-ageism of Sofia and her clients. And there are some good old double entendres, as well as moments of pure farce, such as when Sofia’s husband loses the remote control for a small egglike vibrator she has inserted into her vagina. The film isn’t afraid to spin off into the realm of fantasy and become a kind of magical celebration of the whole New York underworld that those who walk on the wild side call home.

Even though I found it hard to watch all that sex, I recognise that this is an important film, the Sex, Lies, and Videotape of our times. The startling scene where Jamie films himself blowing his own trumpet — if you get my drift — is the perfect image of our lonely, liberated and self-obsessed era. But did Shortbus have to be so explicit? Mitchell claims he didn’t really set out to make an erotic film, but wanted to use “the language of sex as a metaphor for other aspects of the characters’ lives”. Of course, all directors say this when, in fact, they want to cause a sensation. Here, the explicit sex gets in the way of the story: we have to interrupt the narrative flow for the big, shocking sex scene time and time again. It makes the story literal and, at times, heavy-handed — no pun intended.

This is a shame, because Mitchell has managed to assemble a cast of unknowns who are very convincing, especially Dawson as the disturbed James. And he is trying to show us the great schism, affecting so many lives, between the pursuit of sexual gratification and the pursuit of emotional fulfilment. We are opening our legs, our mouths, our bottoms — but our hearts remain closed. What Shortbus reveals is that our need for love, for companionship, is the taboo area, not sex.

Shortbus, Three stars
18, 102 mins

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