American filmmaker Gregg Araki is so over movies taking sex too seriously. A defining figure of the New Queer Cinema moment of the early ’90s, the director of the Teenage Apocalypse film trilogy (Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation, and Nowhere) is back with I Want Your Sex, a cheeky comedy that’s got a throbbing debate penetrating its raunchy romance.
Written by Araki and Karley Sciortino, I Want Your Sex plays like a spirited “fuck you” to Halina Reijn’s Babygirl. That erotic thriller saw a female CEO (Nicole Kidman) risk her comfortable life over a sexual affair with a male intern half her age, who dominated her in a kinky BDSM relationship. By sharp contrast, Araki’s latest keeps the May-December BDSM romance, but turns the tables on who’s wielding the whip.
In Babygirl, the heroine’s desire was transgressive, as she ceded her hard-won power to an impudent younger man in exchange for consensual sexual degradation. In I Want Your Sex, it’s the younger man who is the protagonist hungering to be debased and bossed about. What each craves is the freedom of submission in sexual play, a place where they won’t be judged for their yearnings.
But where Babygirl focuses intently on female desire, I Want Your Sex goes the way of After the Hunt, plunging into a curious intergenerational divide on sex and its politics. Yet, the intellectual undercurrent of this comedy doesn’t keep the film from being wildly funny and scorchingly entertaining.
I Want Your Sex pokes at Gen Z prudishness through millennial provocation.
Mashable has previously reported on how Gen Z appears to be less interested in sex than millennials. This carnal culture clash is explored through I Want Your Sex‘s L.A.-set story of boy meets Domme. Post-college, Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) is floundering to find himself in early adulthood. While his stern girlfriend Minerva (a hilariously frigid Charli XCX) is endlessly focused on her grad school work, Elliot is comically distracted by his sexual desires. Even as Minerva stares at him with boredom, he imagines her talking dirty while big, bouncing cartoon breasts spill out of her top, taunting him.
With such an active sexual imagination, it seems like a (wet) dream for Elliot to get a job working under professional artist and notorious provocateur Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde). The bad bitch of the art world, her work is endlessly centered on sex, lust, and genitals. Thus, she demands a flank of twentysomething lackeys to do her bidding, whether that be answering phones, prepping materials, or satisfying her late-night lust.
The two are absolute opposites. Where Elliot is rumpled, gawky, and wide-eyed, Erika, who is 14 years his senior, struts with an alluring confidence and L.A. edginess. He wears khakis; she sports leather catsuits. He bungles even small talk. She spits out disdain about the art industry and even her own work with all the passion of making a grocery list. Then, she dares Elliot to agree with her after he’s spent all day chewing gum to build a sticky multimedia depiction of a gaping vagina. Where he’s an open book, she’s a triple-latched diary with a latex cover, slicked with lube. And he’s utterly enchanted by this slippery seductress. So when she suggests they have sex with no strings, Elliot is positively giddy.
While their relationship is a HR nightmare, Araki stitches in an undeniable sweetness. Where Elliot’s peers consider him cringe, pervy, and too needy, to Erika, he’s — to pluck a phrase from the recent BDSM rom-com Pillion — got an aptitude for devotion that she appreciates (in her own stoic way).
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A joyful montage displays Elliot and Erika in various kinky scenarios. He’s drop-jawed in delight, accepting a spanking, or handcuffed and bound in leather straps, or crawling around in a skimpy maid’s uniform. But when they’re not fucking, Erika is mind-snapping in her emotional unavailability, insisting to him that sex is the point and means nothing beyond shared pleasure. As Elliot yearns for more — for her to see him or recognize the connection between them beyond the bondage — things turn gnarly, challenging Erika’s carefree-fucking thesis.
Olivia Wilde is a devilish diva in I Want Your Sex.
Wilde exudes thundering sensuality in a dazzling array of kinky clothes, including boldly alluring office attire that would make the office siren girlies faint. Her Erika is not a three-dimensional woman but an art piece of her own making — slick, sexy, and enigmatic. Fitting, then, that Araki begins his film with a nod to an early icon of problematic, unknowable but fabulous film divas: Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.
Like Billy Wilder’s phenomenal classic dark comedy from 1950, I Want Your Sex begins with a doomed figure, floating dead in a sparkling swimming pool, the glow of a posh home shining down on the scene. But this time, it’s not the brash American man who toyed with the heart of a deranged female artist who’s bobbing in the waters. It’s the artist herself.
How did Erika wind up here? And why is Elliot freaking out while wearing a matching pink satin bra and panties? That’s the gleefully tawdry question that Araki poses with his intro. From there, every stilettoed step that Wilde takes in the journey of this deliciously mad baddie plays like a clue.
While Hoffman offers a goofy, guileless smile and willing flesh for the stomping, Wilde is a thigh-high boot in human form. She is shimmering and seductive, but with a threat of pain. To his clown, she is not just an eyebrow-arching straight man but a smirking tyrant, impossibly cool even when behaving like a hot mess, the kind juicy exposés thrive on.
With baby bangs and a chic mullet, Wilde presents L.A.’s art scene as a ruthlessly superficial space where sex sells, and it’s easier to plead ignorance than it is to ask for consent. She is a caricature of a cynical millennial, attracted to Gen Z’s eagerness but bored by their purity politics. Her give-no-fucks façade is as enchanting as it is shallow.
Araki builds out her world with a scowling business partner (an amusingly seething Daveed Diggs). Meanwhile, Elliot’s is filled with friends like Zap, his eye-rolling work bestie (Mason Gooding in sassy mode), his flummoxed roommate Apple (a crackling Chase Sui Wonders), and foes like the two frustrated cops (Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville) interviewing him about Erika’s pivotal last swim. Through all these collisions of colorful characters, Araki is able to explore the central sexual politics with plenty of verve and saucy while silly dialogue.
These contrary viewpoints on sex and relationships are bound to collide dramatically. Thankfully, the pool scene climax is just as juicy and twisted as you might hope for in a Araki spin on Billy Wilder. However, in the film’s overlong resolution, the daring filmmaker who won the first-ever Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival takes his foot off the gas. This give-no-fucks romp about the beauty of making mistakes in lust and love falters in its daring. Its propulsive pace sputters in search of a happy ending that feels so jarring in tone that it feels almost like another one of Elliot’s fantasies — minus the cartoony flare.
Still, even with a conclusion that loses its nerve, I Want Your Sex is an exuberantly entertaining comedy, alive with sexual vigor, earnest humanity, and biting humor.
I Want Your Sex was reviewed out of NewFest; the movie opens in theaters on July 31.
