The current party line around Gen Z is that they have ditched sex en masse in favour of more platonic relationships, thus leaving them more time and energy to lecture their elders about how we’ve monumentally fucked everything up. (Tough, but fair.) Gregg Araki — filmmaker, New Queer Cinema icon, staunch Generation X representative — would like to remind them that once upon a time, sex was cool. Sex was edgy. Sex was natural, sex was fun, sex was best when it was one-on-one.
The fact that I Want Your Sex — not a biopic of George Michael, but if anyone was going to make a dramatisation of the singer’s life and times, we’d want Araki to be the one doing it — features one of the single most sorrowful threesomes to ever grace the screen certainly makes a case for that last part. Mostly, however, the writer-director wants to revisit the so-very-20th-century notion that sex was a way of both defining and giving into your desire, as much a part of personal identity as fashion and pop cultural tastes. His hero, a twentysomething named Elliot, has libido to burn, but no sense of what really gets him going or why such things matter. When a performance artist with an endless amount of fetish gear decides to turn the young horndog into a personal project, the scene is set for a sample platter of deviancy in the name of discovery. The movie is essentially an old-fashioned story of one lad’s sentimental education, spiced up with NSFW perversity. It’s Pygmalion with pegging.
I Want Your Sex is also, as it announces in its cryptic prologue, a send-up of Faustian showbiz noirs like Sunset Boulevard, another story of a campy diva and a pilgrim’s progress in the city of angels. This time, the diva is face down in her pool, and the pilgrim is in skimpy lingerie. Cut to “9 1/2 weeks ago” [yuk yuk yuk]. We meet Elliot, played with winning charm and a great resting confusion face by Cooper Hoffman, right after he’s landed a plum gig at a hip Los Angeles gallery. He and his fellow art-world grunt, Zap (Mason Gooding), stick chewed bubble-gum onto a painting of a vagina. A hovering middle manager (Daveed Diggs) informs Elliot that he’s being summoned to the boss’ office. The poor kid thinks he’s about to get fired. What’s in store for him is far worse. It’s a promotion — not a vertical one so much as an extremely horizontal one.
Because the woman running the place is named Erika, and this performance artist-cum-hotspot owner has decided, for reasons that are never fully articulated (maybe she finds his ability to be easily corrupted a turn-on; maybe she’s just bored), to make him her regular situationship with benefits. She’s played by Olivia Wilde, and along with her role in The Invite, her performance as the dom in this sub-dom rom-com officially makes this a Wilde Hot American Summer. It’s the flip side of the frustrated wife she portrays in that aforementioned hit she also directed, though her cartoonish vamp oddly pairs nicely with the other, far more repressed role. Based loosely on Truth or Dare-era Madonna — you could see Erika putting out several volumes’ worth of Sex books — she is all raging id, mentoring Elliot in the ways of obliterating hang-ups and boundaries in the name of liberation. There’s also hints of vulnerability and genuine tenderness in her stern headmistress of the bedroom, which Wilde slips in just slyly enough to let the presence of a heart peek through all the brainy brashness and hormone overload. She’s clearly on a roll.
Subtlety, of course, is not a word one associates with Gregg Araki’s movies, and like its song-referencing title, I Want Your Sex is about as subtle as a stiletto heel to the sternum. He may have technically aged out of enfant terrible status, and has proven he’s capable of subbing in bruised moodiness for sensationalistic snark — Mysterious Skin (2004) remains the final word on shoegaze coming-of-age movies. But Araki is still very much the guy who gave us angry, Act-Up-influenced road flick The Living End (1992) and the mall-goth-friendly “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy” of yesteryear. It’s a movie made by a cranky Gen X-er who nonetheless feels kinship with over-it-all modern twentysomethings, less aggressive and nihilistic than his past eye rolls on celluloid but still very much of his sensibility.
And like a lot of his films, I Want Your Sex has a lot of interesting elements on its candy-coloured periphery, from Charli XCX delivering the most deadpan fake orgasm ever to The Studio‘s Chase Sui Wonders turning an attempted ménage à trois into a one-act tragedy. It also has a third-act problem, compounded by doubling down on that noirish opening and Johnny Knoxville and Margaret Cho occasionally dropping by to interrogate Elliot about that corpse in the pool. The story is really about Elliot and Erika, and the inevitability that he will outgrow this relationship yet can’t outrun heartbreak. (The ultimate Gen Z fantasy? Domesticity.) When it strays from that, this suggestion that it’s time to bring back sexual emancipation — and sexually emancipated movies — feels perilously close to merely dry-humped subversion. When Sex keeps the focus on the couple at the centre, you can feel it tapping into something as old as the moving pictures themselves. Nothing is hotter than connection.
From Rolling Stone US
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