It’s easy to draw a line between Gregg Araki and the protagonist of I Want Your Sex, his first film since 2014’s White Bird in a Blizzard. Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde) is a renowned artist who never shies away from highlighting how sex lies at the center of her work. The bon mots that characterize the way she speaks reveal her penchant for self-mythologizing, and one of them is a damning indictment of the film itself: “Art is a trace element of the trajectory of fame.”
The film, which explores generational attitudes about sex and a rising puritanical streak among American youth, quickly reveals itself to be little more than a screed in a sex comedy’s clothes. Its account of the budding S&M relationship between Erika and her green new employee, Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), doesn’t push far beyond the talking points of Araki’s philosophy of sex.
Araki and co-writer Karley Sciortino’s closest attempt to map this ideology onto a narrative framework comes from cribbing the basic premise of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, complete with an opening shot from below a body floating in a pool. Except here it’s the woman in her fading glory, not the impressionable young man she ensnares into her web of carnality and chicanery, who ends up in the water. The moment is a promise of subversion that’s revealed to be but a tease, as what follows can hardly be said to upend age-gap tropes in media.
For all of Erika’s talk of making Elliot’s wildest fantasies come to life by broadening his sexual horizons, I Want Your Sex plays it pretty tame in the bedroom, which may come as a surprise to those familiar with Araki’s earlier work, like his Teen Apocalypse trilogy. Wilde cuts loose and embraces the silliness of her character, but the film never matches her energy. If anything, the heavily spliced-together montages of Wilde’s boss character domming her employee are better showcases of the actors’ nudity clauses than they are of the characters’ desires.
Araki’s depiction of an intergenerational office relationship isn’t as incendiary as the ones in Secretary or Babygirl, nor is his portrayal of S&M kinkier than what’s seen in Sanctuary or Pillion. The closest I Want Your Sex comes to actual transgression is showing streaks of ejaculate on Elliot’s shirt following a rare positive portrayal of male masturbation in cinema.
Like all the characters in the film, Elliot feels less like a person than a statement about identity. Throughout, our protagonist guides us through his tempestuous fling with Erika as two police detectives (Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville) question him about her murder. Frustratingly, the script never clarifies who he is outside of the relationship with his employer. Indeed, the scenes between Elliot and his gallery colleague (Mason Gooding), bicurious roommate (Chase Sui Wonders), and disinterested girlfriend (Charli XCX) only serve to reinforce how little interest Araki and Sciortino have in exploring Elliot as anything other than a sex toy—a reactive sounding board for Erika’s ideas rather than someone who can assert his own wants.
Hoffman’s performance never manages to tap into the broadly campy wavelength on which Araki perches I Want Your Sex. While this lack of synchronization with the tone might initially illuminate the sense of shame zoomers feel in approaching sex, there’s no real change in Elliot’s demeanor upon his finding liberation through submission. The film desperately wants to model itself after Erika, who flouts any notions of good taste just as Wilde does in her committed turn, but it gets too caught up in concern trolling about the sexual timidity of today’s youth.
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