Queer Cinema provocateur Gregg Araki’s first feature in 12 years, after the atypical White Bird in a Blizzard, sees him return to his signature themes – sex and sexuality – and trademark comedic style: raunchy, frantic, candy-coloured, surreal and provocative.
I Want Your Sex may not feel as scintillating as Nowhere or The Doom Generation, but there’s something endearing about the fact that the director, now in his Sixties, still has something to say about young people in society. And he remains a gleefully, and refreshingly unrestrained filmmaker.
It starts with a stream of expletives, as a young man with a bloodied nose stumbles through a concrete and glass LA mansion, before discovering a naked woman face down in the swimming pool. This gender-reversed nod to Sunset Boulevard now switches to the chap, Elliott Bell (Cooper Hoffman) being interviewed by two cops in a concrete bunker and a series of flashbacks describing how he found himself in this predicament.
While the noir references are actually paper thin, Billy Wilder’s dangerous gender dynamic will play a big part in the story. The woman in the pool is Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), a celebrity artist and Elliott’s terrifying boss, whose seeming death is the culmination of a long and twisted office relationship.
Elliott is an aimless soul, with a girlfriend, Minerva (Charli xcx, pictured above with Hoffman), who could not be more disinterested if she tried, and a flatmate, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders) tired of covering all his bills. He jumps at the chance to apply for a job as the notorious Erika’s assistant, and ignores all the red flags in the interview – her wholly inappropriate questions and sexual come-ons, the fact that she’d already decided to give him the job before he walked through the door. In truth, a warning for some is simply a fantasy realised for Elliott: when she quickly enlists him as her sub in a BDSM relationship, he’s over the moon. But though Elliot constantly tells the cops that the relationship with Erika was consensual, his boss's interest in him is mostly self-serving and exploitative.
Co-written with Karley Sciortino, I Want Your Sex addresses two societal trends in particular: today’s far greater responsibility with regards sexual harassment and power dynamics in the workplace; and Gen Z’s much-reported lack of sexual activity. Erika dismisses the first as “the woke police” and the latter as the “retro-sex negativity” of “the uptight generation”; she’s clearly in error on the first, though arguably has a point on the second.
You certainly feel that Araki and Sciortino have more sympathy with today’s youth, perhaps hoping that their film might entice them out of their shells. And even as Elliot’s life spirals, in some respects, his sexual shenanigans with Erika do have a liberating effect.
Olivia Wilde is having a good year. Hot on the heels of multi-hyphenate success with The Invite, which involved its own sex-related provocation, she has a ball as the outrageous Erika, resplendent in a series of over-the-top costumes, adding a wry twist to the character’s cynicism, and making her badass behaviour oddly endearing.
Through her, too, Araki gets to take some potshots at the art scene. “Contemporary art is a scam,” she tells her new acolyte. “Convincing people you’re making something meaningful and complex when it’s really just arbitrary masturbation.” And later, when a guest at her new show asks about the meaning of her sex-fixated work: “Fuck me if I know, it means money in my bank account.”
Cooper Hoffman, who made such a strong debut in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (2021) is again excellent as a young man trying to establish who and what he wants to be in life. While Hoffman’s late father, Philip Seymour Hoffman, would have played an obsessive character like Elliot with a discomforting edginess and threat (think of his Allen Mellencamp in Todd Solondz’s Happiness), Cooper simply opens the taps on his abundant puppy dog charm, which makes Elliot at once very vulnerable and strangely resilient.
Chase Sui Wonders from The Studio (pictured above with Hoffman) is a veritable scene stealer as Apple, sheepish about and starved of sex and – in the film’s funniest and most poignant scene – tentatively embracing the chance of a three-way with her best friend and his exotic boss. Charli XCX doesn’t get a great deal to do other than sit in her pyjamas and look bored, but does that with her own innate wattage.
Sadly, it's not long before the set-up runs out of steam. The film may seem like a heady mix of Pillion and Babygirl, but it captures neither the sexual frisson and pleasure of the first, or the office politics or awkward tension of the second. And though amusing, it's not as daring or as biting as Araki in his prime. When Elliot’s gay and more worldly colleague Zap (Mason Gooding) says to him, “Welcome to the sad reality of now”, there’s a suggestion of just how profound the film could have been. But as a riposte to a repressed and sensitive age, it’s ultimately a little limp.
