Bionicmanenator

Touted in the film fest programme as one of the hottest films in the world today, direct from an amazing reception at Cannes, SHORTBUS certainly delivers the goods. Smart, sexy, witty and very, very New York post-post-9/11.

The opening five minutes of the film decide the audience. A surging collage of sex in all its forms: a straight couple fornicating on every concieveable surface in their house; a dominatrix with an attitude being mentally dominated by her client; a gay guy attempting to auto-fellate himself, while his obsessive neighbour watches voueristically. This scene seems to be calculated to sort the conservatives from the liberals in the audience early on, but the sheer good humour and carefree raunchiness of it all keeps even the most prudish glued to their seats.

What unfolds is a brilliant story of how these characters lives collide in a NY sex club where all of their desires and anguish are played out to the full. It is all beautifully linked together by some vibrantly observed animation of the New York cityscape by John Bair.

It's not all about great laughs in this film either. A well constructed scenario about New Yorkers surviving the post-9/11 maelstrom is given a minor acknowledgement and characters are constructed around their various sexual hang-ups. In lesser hands, the second of these would usually come across as angsty over-indulgence, but director John Cameron Mitchell gives us a cast of whole credible characters, free of pretension and open to the possibilities of change.

The film ends with a fantastic feeling of carnival, albeit slightly jaded, that is evidenced by a joyous scene of revelry and fornication that frees the characters from their self-imposed sexual restrictions, leaving the audience on the same high when they leave the theatre.

Festivals around the world have had quite a tough time getting explicit works like this screened. The New Zealand International Festival has in the past had as its bugbear Mr David Lane of the Society for the Protection of Community Standards, who has seen it fit to cause a lot of noise over various films of "objectionable" nature in the past. This film stands proudly head and shoulders above any of those that have gone before in its depiction of sex on screen and it was almost disapointing to find out that Mr Lane was out of the country during the festival. If he had been in the country, I'm sure some noise would have been made as SHORTBUS simply goes well beyond anything the European sex-films of the past few years ever would or could.

Excellent filmmaking, watchable performances and very very sexy. The porn film has come of age.