Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell, 2006)

 When I first saw Shortbus at the theater when it came out, I thought that it was an interesting movie, but with flaws. When I watched it again after many years, I realized that those flaws were part... of the whole game that the film plays. Shortbus in reality is a fearless, provoking movie that is not happy with simply touching things, but is interested in getting to the actual core. Famous and notorious for its sex scenes this movie actually gets inside the human being. And by that I mean that is not happy with simply showing things, but it considers to make you feel things, to make you sense things. John Cameron Mitchell has also done Rabbit Hole an exceptionally gritty drama, a drama that takes its theme as far as it goes, but here is making a movie that you could easily call "erotic comedy-drama", but that characterization would be totally unsuccessful. Because Shortbus is clearly a dive inside the human's emotional universe. It's a snapshot of the things that humans do and suffer from.

 I would certainly call it one of the most interesting contemporary cult movies. And I think that it takes the "cult" seal because of the way it deals with the matters that it touches. Shortbus isn't and that's its biggest attribute in any way didactic. It doesn't try to sell morality to us, like so many American films try. Its world, its universe is that of the observer. It observes humans and their behaviors. And that of course is a thing that we all ask from art. We are not fucking interested to give us a moral code anymore. So many films try, eagerly, to give us something valuable to take home and they end up giving us waffling on superficial things that are presented as the huge truth of life. No, we don't fucking want that! We are interested in the method of communication. And when you are communicating something, you are not here to simply judge it, but you are here to state it. And that's what Shortbus is doing actually. It states things. It states things in a way that is so truthful, fragile and human, that you are left with nothing less that admiration for the movie.