So does it make me a prude if I hated Shortbus? John Cameron Mitchell might say so, but then again I wouldn’t trust him to deliberate over anything that might take longer than an orgasm. Progressive couples at the hippie-yuppie nexus may enjoy the drone of fellow bees, and even learn how to maximise the energy flow of their IKEA lounge suite. But for me this is just the same antibourgeois pamphlet that was being handed out four decades ago (the principle difference being that hunter and hunted now seem to have merged irreparably): It draws circles of exclusion outta the twin imports of hipster iconography and Victorian-grade repression.

The two intersect at Sofia, a sex therapist who’s never gotten off, and whose crisis becomes a symbol for the existential hand-wringing of 9/11; there’s also James and Jaime, a gay couple who don’t have penetrative sex, and Severin, a dominatrix unable to form lasting relationships. They all come together in an opening scene that directly quotes Amelie, in which the camera nimbly flits from bedscene to bedscene like a stray feather. Set to lite jazz, Mitchell’s New York is envisioned as a crayoned utopia, replete with cardboard tenements and a candy-coloured sky; “the last place people come to be fucked... and forgiven,” as a fossilized ex-mayor puts it. A tonal lithium-case, the majority of the film is spent in active pursuit of both of those things, parsing through self-alienation, suicide, ground zero, etc. with the airy obsolecence of a Sex and the City episode. Even the sex is boring, which is fatal in a scenario that revels in its capacity for self-betterment: Mitchell’s idea of an erotic high-point is a miasma of bodies flowing like lava, as Animal Collective offers up spiritual welts. And as well-intentioned as this ode to reconnecting may ultimately seem, it’s too wrapped around its own micro-scene abuse to be truly instructional. At the Shortbus (a sex club that curiously houses Yo La Tengo) orgasm’s a baseline that calls for the right configuration, yet unconventionality seems to be the rule rather than the guideline. And that can be pretty lonely for anyone left standing outside its doors.—David Levinson