Short changed

I, like many people I imagine, picked up Shortbus knowing nothing about it except that it would show me real people doing real rude things to each other. I had my suspicions that the film itself would be a big bag of shite, but that was by and by: It would show me REAL RUDE THINGS. Like willies, breasts and poos. And people doing really rude things with them. FOR REAL.

It shares the same main marketing hype that of Nine Songs, i.e. the actors actually have sex on film. And like Nine Songs, it is pretty unwatchable, though this has nothing to do with the sex which, like Nine Songs, is tame and humdrum.

Though where the story in Nine Songs was a wistful (mediocre) tale about lost love, Shortbus is a mess of confused imbeciles braying about their minor sexual hangups.

The Shortbus of the title is a semi-secret club in New York where people from all walks of life (read bland Greenwich Village stereotypical liberals) supposedly go to explore their sexuality, though I suppose you could also check the place out if you wanted to see a bunch of vacuous faux-boho leeches having mediocre nookie.

You can imagine the type of irritatingly smug couples going to watch this film, hand in hand, exchanging knowing glances as they watch the collection of howling mediocrities that make up the characters of this film talk oh-so-openly about their correspondingly meagre and inconsequential sexual problems.

It reminds me of the kind of dull-eyed fondue-bores who would populate risque late-night shows for grown-ups only with titles like Clitoral Knowledge and Viva las Vulva, talking openly and frankly about trying to sauce up their sex-lives with various lubricatory gels, battery-operated anal-explorers and wife-swapping with the pasty middle-aged couple from next door while Graham Norton guffawed in the background. That is, it's fucking tedious.

There is almost a nod to the stupidity of this kind of machete-frenzy-inducing emotional openness in the film when a husband and wife decide to solve their argument with a frank and honest exchange leafed out of a self-help book. But as a satire this scene is pretty limp when it becomes apparent that the entire film has this annoyingly smug air of people who boast about being open-minded and sexually liberated but who are, infact, just boring.

All becomes clear at the end of the film when the credits roll and it is revealed that the story was written in collaboration with the cast, while the thing was being filmed, which in particular explains the badly-executed and insubstantial conflicts and their conclusions. Though nothing can excuse the cloyingly self-congratulatory sing-song at the end, nor the climax to the storyline of the woman who couldn't achieve one. A climax, that is.

This rash of films of late which involve 'actual sex' usually deny that this is the main point of the film, but then go on to use it in their blurb, and turn out to have absolutely no merit. I'm not against seeing real sex in films. It would just be great if one day we could see it in good films that don't harp on about the fact that they feature real sex. If anything, it's probably easier and more fun for the actors, and more believable for the audience (I always wonder how they achieve convincing sex in films without affecting actual penetration; I imagine it involves lots of gaffer tape and plenty of persistent and uncomfortable rashes).

But until then, it's the pornos that will have better sex, deeper characterisation and more interesting plotlines than Shortbus and movies of its ilk.