For his first film in 12 years, indie auteur Gregg Araki takes aim at Gen-Z’s disinterest in all things carnal (in life and movies) with I Want Your Sex, a wild romp in which Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman enter into a BDSM relationship.
The go-for-broke spark that enlivened the director’s finest work, however, is only intermittently evident in his comeback feature, which—debuting at the Sundance Film Festival—is consistently funny and erotic, if ultimately a bit too straightlaced for the incendiary subject matter at hand.
One of Wilde’s two entries at this year’s fest (the other being The Invite, her behind-the-camera follow-up to Don’t Worry Darling), I Want Your Sex is a comedy about sex, performance, power, love, and the often out-there ties that (literally and figuratively) bind.
The actress goes full-tilt nasty as Erika Tracy, a pop-art provocateur who’s found lying face down in a swimming pool by Elliot (Hoffman), whose nose is bleeding, is dressed in women’s underwear, and appears to have no idea how the evening took a turn for the tragic.
In an interrogation room opposite two police officers (Johnny Knoxville, Margaret Cho), Hoffman recounts the events leading up to this fateful incident, and the fact that this necessitates a rewind to 9 ½ weeks earlier is the first of numerous wink-wink jokes which indicate that Araki is having self-conscious fun with his chosen titillating subgenre.
Erika is a sociopathic attention whore who wears flamboyantly revealing outfits involving leather, latex, high heels, and chainmail.
Elliot, a 23-year-old schlub with few professional prospects, is entranced by her, and when an assistant position opens up at her gallery, he eagerly applies. This is good news to his best friend and roommate, Apple (The Studio’s Chase Sui Wonders), given that Elliot can’t pay the rent. Their Fruit Loops-colored apartment is emblematic of Araki’s bright, bold, primary-colored aesthetics, which also involve punk-rock cuts that strive, with moderate success, to infuse the proceedings with the full-throttle energy of his acclaimed films Totally F---ed Up, The Doom Generation, and Mysterious Skin.
Wearing a collection of t-shirts beneath open button-downs, his hair a perpetual mess, Elliot isn’t cut out for this job or the scene. Thus, he’s stunned when, after pontificating about how “contemporary art is a scam” that strives to convince patrons that it’s not “arbitrary masturbation,”
Erika hires him on the spot, much to the chagrin of her colleague (Daveed Diggs). The awestruck way that Elliot gazes at Wilde’s fearsome goddess is impossible to miss (including by Mason Gooding’s casually uninhibited gallery employee Zap), as are Erika’s unsubtle manipulations. Consequently, it’s no surprise that Knoxville and Cho’s cops identify the young man as a victim of “grooming”—an assessment that he doesn’t totally dispute, even though he proclaims that their affair was consensual.
Erika is a decade and a half older than Elliot, and their age gap, coupled with the fact that she’s his boss, gives I Want Your Sex its sexual harassment-y tension. Araki revels in their “dom” and “sub” dynamic, with Erika expanding Elliot’s sexual horizons with whips, handcuffs, paddles, and other penetrating toys.
Wilde’s performance, frequently sans clothes, has a playfully mean quality that sells Erika’s appeal to “weakling” Elliot, and her cattiness and cruelty are representative of the film’s naughtily inflammatory attitude.
Hoffman isn’t quite as assured as his multihyphenate costar, if only because his character never seems passive enough to immediately go all-in on this consuming BDSM fling.
On the backs of Elliot’s hands are tattoos that read, respectively, “Yes?” and “No?”, and such symbols of indecision are at odds with his hesitation-free embrace of this wacky new reality, regardless of his understandable discontent with a girlfriend, Minerva (Charli XCX, in her second Sundance film following The Moment), who cares more about studying than paying attention to, much less satisfying, her beau.
Araki pitches his material as cartoony to the point of indulging in some gonzo animation, most notably a fantasy sequence in which Elliot imagines Minerva opening her shirt to reveal gargantuan boobs.
There’s a lightheartedness to I Want Your Sex that bolsters its humor, and an attempted threesome between Erika, Elliot, and Apple locates the perfect crazy-awkward-uncomfortable-scary tone for a film that recognizes sexual exploration and experimentation as both potentially liberating and destructive.
Meanwhile, Erika’s jabs about Elliot’s generation’s uptight, stunted “retro sex negativity,” and his level-headed response regarding the factors that have turned his contemporaries socially inept, prove amusing nods to today’s shifting sexual landscape.
Despite that conversation’s even-handedness, I Want Your Sex is surprisingly conservative for a director who’s never been much of a traditionalist. For all its boundary-pushing bravado, the film has a sneakily conventional heart, such that despite Erika’s belief that sex gives people a sense of identity and control, it eventually imagines bedroom madness leading to, if not actual monogamy and true love, then at least subconscious thoughts about it. Araki shrewdly doesn’t try to reconcile his tale’s warring impulses.
Nonetheless, there’s a nagging impression that, when it comes to licentiousness, he’s pulling his punches.
I Want Your Sex deliberately takes a more mainstream approach to its randy material, and its self-awareness—like Elliot saying that the primary things separating sexually explicit art and pornography are “lighting, context”—is central to its tongue-in-cheek ridiculousness.
It’s too bad that it can’t sustain its initial breakneck verve. Even at a concise 90 minutes, the film accurately emulates Elliot by crawling to the finish line. Still, Wilde and Hoffman’s yin-yang chemistry is spicy and sweet enough to keep things spirited, and the director’s florid flourishes and elastic, bubbly visuals have a vibrancy that fits this goofy material like a glove.
As interested in eliciting laughs as generating heat, Araki’s latest (which concludes with a cameo from his former leading man James Duval) wants nothing more than to be a rollicking ode to getting off by doing what you want—and, additionally, by being told what to do.
If its navigation of these treacherous emotional-sensual waters is a bit surface-level, it remains an entertainingly steamy odyssey about the search for fulfillment in life, love, work, and bed.
