I went to see Shortbus tonight. It was fully awesome. There was quite a lot of sex in it, and some of it was a bit intense, but it wasn't nearly as confronting as I'd expected. It wasn't trying to be sexy really so the sex wasn't as uncomfortable as it might have been. The director described it like this:
I would define porn - and I think most people would -- as something that is made to arouse. That is its primary purpose and other things are unimportant. In our case, sex is used as a language to find out more about our characters, their emotions, their background, to make thematic points.
It might sound like a cop-out, but it feels truthful to me. Mil, Martin and I were talking about it tonight. I was defending the use of real sex because I think that the realer it is the fuller the story. You can take that to extremes, and you have to decide if it's already gone too far. I didn't think so. The gay threesome singing the American anthem was my favourite, but it's probably the scene that pushed the limits the most. None of it felt gratuitous to me at all. Even the crazy acrobatic scene at the beginning was a good way of telling you about those two characters.
Apparently, the actors all got to know each other really well years before they shot any of the scenes. They workshopped it for several years, and wrote the script as they went. They worked out which of the actors were attracted to which of the other actors. The director claims only one of the orgasms was faked. People have compared it to porn, but this was sincere in a way that the porn I've seen couldn't imagine.
You could have made the film without all the sex. The whole film was really funny. The characters were great. The script was great. The flying shots through the model city were totally cool. The whole story was really well done. But it wouldn't have been as good. It was telling stories about the messy, quiet bits of everyone's lives which are never told.
That said, if you aren't willing to watch a man fellate himself, I probably wouldn't recommend it to you.
[…] I reckon we hope that directors will have a natural prejudice against nasty sorts of things because they make us uncomfortable. I didn’t think the sex in Shortbus detracted from it at all. To me, making a movie that talked a lot about sex and actually had sex in it was a brave sort of thing to do. Talking about sex is easy. Clerks II talked a lot about it, and didn’t have any. It was a good film, but it feels kind of fake. It feels like a film rather than a story. Films are concerned with the viewers response but stories are not. If the purpose of telling a story is to change things then perhaps a story should be more practical. But I don’t think the purpose of stories always is to change things. If I was tortured in prison for 10 years I’d want the story of what happened told, not the story that would affect the most people. […]
Fat Vegan › Apocalypto / 10:06am / 13 January 2007