Shortbus at Cannes

[Mogul]

Sounds interestingly - maybe we will see the film here in November as well - fortunately, we have a gay film festival once a year (!) travelling through majour German cities.

I never understood why the film art was to be artificially separated into "pornography" and the "real art". Isn't a symbiosis of both providing the most thrilling impressions?

[Feral]

CANNES, France — There's usually a film here that kicks up dust with boundary-pushing sexuality. In 2003, it was "The Brown Bunny," which included a graphic oral-sex scene that writer-director and star Vincent Gallo took great pains to tell everyone was real, not staged.

This year's provocateur is "Shortbus." And it has everyone buzzing.

It seems the film contains a great deal of sex -- all of it real.

Whether it's viewed as art or not will, of course, be up to the audience, but writer-director John Cameron Mitchell, whose previous film "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" attracted critical attention, doesn't see his latest work as pornographic.

"I actually like pornography, but I don't consider this film pornographic," Mitchell told a festival news conference over the weekend. "I define — and most people do — pornography as devoid of artistic intent. The purpose of pornography is to arouse. I don't think anyone got [sexually aroused] watching this film."

That's not to say he didn't intend the sexuality to excite. "There is a certain provocation we had in mind with this film, but more important than that, we wanted to use sex as a metaphor for things that were, perhaps, universal, themes like connection and love and fear. We just thought the language of sex could be used the way the language of music could be used in a musical."

The young cast includes Jay Brannan, who is one of my favorite singer/song writers. His first CD has yet to be made, but you can download some of his work at his web page or his page on MySpace.

Perhaps understandably, the film Shortbus does not yet have a distributor.