When Gregg Araki brought his new movie, I Want Your Sex, to this year's Sundance Film Festival, it felt like a long-overdue homecoming. In the early '90s, Sundance helped launch Araki into the front ranks of queer independent filmmakers, with daringly sexy, funny and violent tales of gay identity like The Living End, Nowhere and Totally F***ed Up.
His output has been more erratic in the decades since, but in all his work, including the 2019 TV series Now Apocalypse, he's never lost sight of sex as a defining force in the lives of his characters as well as his audiences. Or, as one character in I Want Your Sex puts it: "Sex is everything."
Those are the words of Erika Tracy, a multimedia artist who's known for her provocative work; she's played by a terrific Olivia Wilde. When we first meet Erika, she's floating face-down in her own Los Angeles swimming pool, while a young man in a pink bra and panties — that's Elliot, played by Cooper Hoffman — clumsily tries to save her.
I was reminded of the beginning of Sunset Boulevard, and indeed, I Want Your Sex is an erotic comedy by way of a noirish mystery. The story flashes back several weeks to around the time Erika hires Elliot as her assistant. Elliot is smart and friendly, but also hopelessly naïve. He has no idea what he's in for when one day, Erika calls him into her office to accuse him of flirting with her.
Erika's accusation is, of course, a come-on. Before long, the two have crossed over into "entirely inappropriate" terrain, with Erika initiating Elliot into a dominant-submissive relationship. Most of their encounters take place at Erika's home and are played for easy laughs.
But when they're not having sex, Erika and Elliot have some pretty pointed conversations about why so many Gen-Zers like Elliot are … well, not having sex. Elliot blames COVID and overprotective parents, noting that he and his peers were raised to fear any kind of in-person socialization, let alone intimacy. Erika calls them all out as a generation of cowards, arguing that the whole point of sex, and of life itself, is to take risks and push past boundaries.
Araki more or less agrees with her. You could think of I Want Your Sex as his state-of-the-physical-union address. At 66, he no longer represents the younger generation, but he's still clearly concerned for their well-being. That might have seemed condescending coming from another filmmaker, but Araki's style of comedy is warm, genuinely inclusive and thoroughly disarming.
From moment to moment, the movie is pure pleasure — full of bright colors, delectable sight gags and sharp, pop-culture-savvy one-liners, like when Elliot, wearing all black for a hot date, is told that he looks like "an assassin in a Netflix yakuza movie." There are also sharp performances from Mason Gooding as Elliot's snarky gay co-worker, Zap, and Chase Sui Wonders as Elliot's best friend, Apple, who envies his forays into kink.
As it turns out, though, there's not much to envy. Erika invites Elliot to take their already wild relationship to another level, but what happens next simply doesn't ring true — it's the movie's most daring scene and, ultimately, its most disappointing one. Like some other recent BDSM-themed films, like Babygirl and Pillion, I Want Your Sex brings its leads to an emotional crisis point that lays bare the long-term limitations of the characters' arrangement.
Araki is hardly a moralist, but he's mellowed a bit since his more radical early days, and the movie, for all its twists and trysts, follows a fairly conventional arc. And the narrative machinery really starts to splutter in the closing stretch, as the pieces of the swimming-pool mystery plot snap laboriously into place.
Even so, I left I Want Your Sex with real respect for Araki's determination to start a cross-generational conversation and his fondness for his characters and his actors. Hoffman, who came to fame a few years ago in Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza, has a wily goofball charisma; he never becomes the butt of the movie's joke.
And Wilde is outstanding as Erika, mocking her own art-world pretensions one minute, delivering a sex-positive monologue the next, and always seeming to keep the truth of what she really wants under wraps. She's a classic Gregg Araki creation — a hilarious yet wholly serious reminder of the slippery, unpredictable nature of human desire.
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