As you might suspect from the title, “I Want Your Sex” has no time for niceties. Right at the start, it serves up a generous helping of hot mess, with a stream of expletives, a jolt of violence, and what appears to be a corpse adrift in a Los Angeles swimming pool. You may think, as I did, of “Sunset Boulevard” (1950), but here the Joe Gillis character, a gingery-haired twentysomething named Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), is alive, and it’s his Norma Desmond counterpart who is floating face down. “Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck,” Elliot mutters, as he stumbles upon the sight of his former boss, the artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), bobbing nude in the water. How she got there is just one of the story’s mysteries. Like, why is Elliot’s face smeared with blood? And why is he wearing a lacy pink bra and panties?
The answer is that this is a Gregg Araki movie, meaning that a character needs no more reason to don skimpy, rose-colored undergarments than he would to strap on a collar and crawl on all fours. The film revolves around a dominant-submissive relationship, and Elliot, who’s genial, scruffy, and broke, is the designated sub. The dom is Erika, who has made a reputation for herself as a sexually provocative art-world libertine, and who, as the story proper begins, hires Elliot as her assistant. It’s through his wide, impressionable eyes that Araki’s goofily scrambled nympho-noir plot comes into focus. On an average day, Elliot might find himself painting a sculpted phallus or festooning a sketch of a vagina with pieces of half-chewed gum, usually alongside his co-worker Zap (Mason Gooding), a hot, gay, and snarky voice of sanity. On a wilder day, which soon becomes the new average, Erika summons Elliot to her office or her mansion, where she proceeds to fuck him and fuck with him, seldom in that order.
That’s ridiculous, but, cheerfully and unabashedly, so is “I Want Your Sex.” The verbal and visual building blocks of Araki’s comedy—quick-witted one-liners, exuberant sex scenes, sartorial gags, garish décor—express a dazzling, totalizing sense of optimism. Hoffman’s lummoxy charisma fits right into this scheme and makes it hard to begrudge Elliot even his more vanilla fantasies. Hoffman had an auspicious screen début in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza” (2021), which was also premised on a younger-man-older-woman dynamic, albeit one that was sedulously, almost distractingly chaste. His character in that film had a gawky teen-age bravado, a precocious man-of-the-world assurance. Elliot is completely in over his head by comparison, but Hoffman himself feels fully and gamely in his element; if his improbability as a romantic lead is part of the joke, it never comes at the actor’s expense. Elliot may be just a “boy whore” to Erika—in one scene, she pimps him out to a friend (Roxane Mesquida), who rejects the offering with supremely French disdain—but he also elicits from her an unexpected tenderness, a sneaky affection, that the audience comes to share.
How we feel about Erika is harder to clamp down. Some of her verbal provocations have a reactionary tilt; she rolls her eyes at the “woke police,” waves aside issues of consent, and insinuates that the whole point of sex is the eradication of boundaries. But she also has a dry self-awareness, a willingness to puncture her bad-girl reputation and the extravagances of the art world. “Contemporary art is a scam,” she declares; later, she calls herself “a pretentious whore from hell.” Whether or not she’s joking, Wilde makes the character a devilish hoot, and not just because the first outfit we see her in is a slinky red number that might as well come with a forked tail.
It’s a measure of Wilde’s range that, in her recent marital comedy, “The Invite”—which, like “I Want Your Sex,” premièred at this year’s Sundance Film Festival—she played a housewife who was both tickled and intimidated by the prospect of swinging with the neighbors. Erika wouldn’t bat an eye at the suggestion. In the story’s trickiest development, she orders Elliot to bring a friend to their next assignation, and he unwisely chooses his female bestie and roommate, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders), who seems eager to get in on the action. (“Why does all the cool sex-deviant stuff always happen to you?” she asks.) But the attempted three-way that follows is a bummer, for the characters and for us, and for reasons that, more than anything, smack of narrative expedience. Long-term relational unsustainability has become the default endgame of B.D.S.M.-themed romances—think of “Babygirl” and “Pillion,” to take two recent examples—and “I Want Your Sex” proves no exception. Instead of risking an unfettered exploration of the thrills and limitations of impromptu throupling, the movie contrives to push Erika and Elliot to a crisis point, and to imply that, even in the most depersonalized physical exchange, there are always strings attached.
Araki has often named his characters with wily playfulness. His surreal, harrowing “Nowhere” (1997) featured characters named Dark, Lucifer, Egg, Jujyfruit, and Handjob. The director paid tribute to Jean-Luc Godard, one of his main inspirations, in “The Living End” (1992), a road movie about two gay men named Jon and Luke. With this context in mind, the name Erika evokes one of the great dominatrices in literature and cinema: Erika Kohut, the icily repressed protagonist of Elfriede Jelinek’s novel “The Piano Teacher” (1983) and Michael Haneke’s film adaptation, from 2001. (The other allusions in “I Want Your Sex” aren’t so lofty; in one cheeky nod to a trash-cinema touchstone, the flashbacks kick off with a title card that reads “9 1/2 WEEKS AGO.”) But it’s also hard not to interpret Erika, with her passionate doctrine of sexual liberation, as a fictional stand-in for her creator. When she tells Elliot that “sex is everything,” she might as well be articulating Araki’s own mission statement.
Araki’s concerns about the sexual habits and mores (or lack thereof) of today’s youth extend to the increasingly puritanical, sex-negative tendencies of so much contemporary cinema, an unfortunate trend to which “I Want Your Sex” means to serve as a corrective. But it’s certainly a slicker, lighter, less subversive kind of corrective than, say, “Totally F***ed Up” (1994), “The Doom Generation” (1995), and “Nowhere”—the daring independent films that constitute his foundational “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy,” which propelled him into the forefront of America’s burgeoning queer-cinema movement. He has undeniably mellowed in the decades since, though in works like “Kaboom” (2011) and “Now Apocalypse,” his TV series from 2019, he has continually returned to his doomsday preoccupations. The end of the world remains, for him, a potent metaphor for the cataclysmically unstable nature of youthful sexual discovery.
In “I Want Your Sex,” the director’s first feature in more than a decade, the genre is noir rather than science fiction, and it’s in this choice, I think, that Araki’s kooky conception ultimately runs aground. Much of the story is narrated by Elliot, in flashback, to a pair of straitlaced cops, who are played by Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville; it’s fun enough to see them that you wish they both had more to do, besides stoking the audience’s nostalgia for an earlier generation of outrage artists. The film’s twisty wrap-up feels creaky and far-fetched in ways that the rest of the movie, over the top though it is, does not, and you can sense Araki struggling to bring his two leads, and their oppositional schools of sexual thought, to a place of convergence. No wonder the film, flippantly but not unpleasantly, ends on a question mark—a shrug suggesting that, if sex is everything, Araki still has stamina to burn. Should we get lucky, the mystery of desire is one he’ll never stop trying to solve. ♦
