PLOT: Between 9/11 and the big blackout of 2003, beleaguered Manhattanites explore their sexuality and discover a sense of community beyond the orgasm.
Like the film they populate, the characters in John Cameron Mitchell's transgressive film Shortbus dare to be different.
So do the actors playing them, by indulging in explicit sex acts -- real, not faked -- in front of the cameras.
Even Mitchell, the brilliant writer-director-actor-singer who also created the gender-bending musical Hedwig And The Angry Inch, does a brief cameo performing cunnilingus. It is the gay man's first sex act with a woman and, in his usual droll fashion, he has joked off-screen that he still managed to direct the scene by looking up from his task.
So it should come as no surprise that the first quarter of Shortbus is an orgy of explicit sexual acts. They range from a yoga-flexible man's successful auto-fellatio to a bedroom romp that Toronto co-star Sook-Yin Lee has with her on-screen husband, Raphael Barker.
The most notorious (and funny) scene is a homosexual threesome with the men singing The Star-Spangled Banner, one using another man's butt as his vocal mute.
The bravura explicit sex, of course, raises not only eyebrows but the possibility that Shortbus is just a fluids-drenched porno masquerading as art. I understand if the premise makes some people squeamish or reluctant.
Remarkably, though, despite the indulges and the lavish close-ups, Shortbus really is surprisingly worthwhile. It is mainstream, pop culture, cinematic art. And it does possess a defensible intellectual raison d'etre.
The title refers to the small buses used to transport people who reside outside of the mainstream because of mental or physical challenges, or because they are extremely gifted.
The metaphor is pretty obvious, in an X-Men mutant manner. Especially if you accept that "dare to be different" credo about the characters, each of which was developed by Mitchell in collaboration with the actor.
The film takes these people -- all vaguely troubled, all worried about being alone, all looking for love and connection and a sense of community -- and moves them toward an epiphany of understanding, not just an orgasm.
Sook-Yin Lee's character, for example, follows that path on several levels. As the American film's token Canadian, she plays a Canuck ex-patriot now working as a sex therapist in New York. But she needs therapy, too, because she cannot achieve an orgasm with her husband, despite their enthusiastic sexual gynmastics.
Meanwhile, two of Lee's gay clients -- played by Paul Dawson and PJ DeBoy -- are having serious relationship problems. She counsels them and they return the favour, taking her to celebrated drag queen Justin Bond's club, Shortbus. Bond, as himself, is the life of every party.
At the Shortbus club, Lee will be introduced to sexual freedom, the possibility of an orgasm and the probability of joining a larger community of like-minded liberal people.
So Mitchell's film is hopeful and ultimately happy, which is foreshadowed even in the gorgeous opening credits, which are a colour-saturated cartoon version of the Manhattan skyline (the closing credits are just as artsy).
The mood is set, the sex begins and audiences go wild. But, as the loving story unfolds in the second and third acts, you realize that no mere porno would ever go this far into the emotional realm of its copulating couples.
Shortbus might drive the censors crazy, but it is the real deal as a study of the human condition.
BOTTOM LINE: Obviously not for the faint-hearted, the repressed or the uptight. But this wildly explicit carnal flick is not just raunchy, it is courageous and so "au courant" in its sexual and social politics.
(This film is rated R)
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