KEY POINTS:
Herald rating: * * *
There's something so sweet and old-fashioned about this earnest and occasionally funny valentine to sex that it's hard to believe it's set in a post-9/11 New York.
Justin Bond, the flamboyant host of the nightclub that gives the film its name, says
"it's like the 60s, only with less hope". It might seem a tailor-made signature line for the film but it's delivered in too camp and throwaway a fashion to be as nihilistic as it reads. In fact, the characters are full of hope - even if, to anyone who remembers the 60s, it seems very naive.
Those characters include Jamie (Dawson), half of a gay couple of which the other half (DeBoy) is also called Jamie, who are discussing a plan to "open up" their relationship with a sex therapist, Sofia (Lee).
She prefers to be known as a couples counsellor which is perhaps just as well because, as she confides in the men, she is "pre-orgasmic".
"Does that mean you're about to have one?" asks one of the Jamies, who decide to help Sofia learn to let go by inviting her to Shortbus, a club where people hang out and have sex, mostly, but not always, with the person they came with. (It takes its name from the school bus often ridden by "special needs" kids ; it is, says the film-maker, a vehicle for outcasts and misfits).
At or through the club, Sofia and her husband Rob (Barker) meet a variety of more-or-less troubled denizens of the demi-monde, including Severin (Beamish), a dominatrix who just wants "a house and a cat that I can pet".
The eyepoppingly explicit sex is joyous, tender and rambunctious. But it seems faintly sad that the characters think all this shagging is getting them anywhere. The ending culminates in a marvellous set piece song which is entitled "We all get it in the end". There are probably many more ways to take that than the four I can think of.
Cast: Sook-Yin Lee, Paul Dawson, Lindsay Beamish, P.J. Deboy, Raphael Barker, Peter Stickles, Justin Bond
Director: John Cameron Mitchell
Running time: 102 minutes
Rating: R18, explicit sex scenes
Screening: Rialto
Verdict: Eyepoppingly explicit, non-simulated sex is the talking point in an oddly affecting film about troubled New Yorkers trying to bonk the blues away
