Shortbus

Director: John Cameron Mitchell

2006 / 102min / DCP

An anorgasmic sex therapist, a gay throuple, their stalker neighbor, and a lonesome dominatrix are among the habitues of the titular drag queen-hosted artistic/erotic Brooklyn salon in Mitchell’s sweet-spirited, polymorphously perverse, penetration-and-all sex comedy, communally written over the course of two-and-a-half years of improvisation workshops with a cast assembled via internet audition. Along with various gatherings in ’00s New York City sharing certain characteristics with the Shortbus salon, Mitchell drew inspiration from Ripploh’s Taxi zum Klo, of which he would say: “It had a sense of humor, a sense of melancholy, and a sense of reality. The filmmaker was telling his own story, but in a way that didn’t seem solipsistic.”

Distributor: Oscilloscope Pictures