Sex, money and murder: Gregg Araki knows what people want, and it’s been a long time since he last gave it to them, in 2015’s racy doomsday cult comedy Kaboom. Premiering at Sundance for the 11th time, Araki used his pulpit there to pay tribute to the late Robert Redford for his foresight in establishing a creative outlet for minorities and outsider artists, a safe space that established him as cinema’s punk poet laureate of Generation X. By contrast, I Want Your Sex, in no way connected to the George Michael song of the same name, is his outreach to Generation Z, a campy, ridiculous, raunchy comedy that riffs on the age gap, and wonderful odd-couple chemistry, between his two leads. Imagine if Babygirl had been fun and — assuming you have a high tolerance for smut — this one’s for you.
In some ways, it is Araki’s gender-reversed Sunset Boulevard; in the opening scenes, a scantily clad young man named Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) finds his lover Erika (Olivia Wilde) floating upside down, naked, in her pool. Elliot has a bloody nose, a mouth smeared with lipstick and is wearing a frilly pink bra and pants. How did he get there? Araki flashes back a tongue-in-cheek nine-and-a-half weeks to show us, alternating key moments from Elliot’s life with deadpan police interrogation scenes, where Elliot is questioned by officers played, with Araki’s undeniable casting brilliance, by Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville.
Erika, we learn, is a provocative artist whose sexually explicit work lines her gallery, a place staffed by pretentious freaks and fashion casualties who make Elliot stand out a mile with his quite astonishingly style-averse attitude to clothing. By contrast, Erika is a vamp, a woman whose wardrobe encompasses high fashion and BDSM — maybe this is what makes Erika choose him to be her assistant, just as her icy, dominatrix cool appeals to the refreshingly artless Elliot.
Wilde nails Erika’s appeal from her first introduction, a smart, beautiful woman who knows exactly what she’s doing (“You know I hate criticism,” she tells her office manager, “especially when it’s accurate”). Elliot, meanwhile, is in awe of her rep, telling his best friend Apple (Chase Sui Wonders), in hushed tones, that Erika was rumored to have “f*cked Vincent Gallo at the New York premiere of The Brown Bunny when she was 18,” one of many good jokes aimed at Araki’s peers.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” Erika asks Elliot, knowing that she shouldn’t ask, and guaranteeing that she would “never say anything that inappropriate,” directly after saying it. Elliot sees the way this is going and immediately signs up for a strings-free sexual affair in which she never misses a chance to mock and humiliate this zillennial’s contemporaries as “whiney, repressed weaklings”. To add to Elliot’s woes, he feels his prudish girlfriend Minerva (Charlie XCX, cast amusingly against type), is forcing him to cheat, and her feeble faked orgasms suggest the singer has an untapped talent for comedy.
The art world is an easy target for satire, but Araki doesn’t seem too bothered by that and neither should he, since sexually explicit art has never really gone out of style, and neither has the argument about style over content ever been won — “Contemporary art is a scam, you know that, right?” Erika lectures Elliot, right before she spends $20k on a painting shows the word “F*ck” scrawled in white on a black background. In Araki’s film, art isn’t something to be taken seriously, and something that’s been wonderful to see in his films over the years is the way he takes a similar approach to sexuality, making films that are a broad church in terms of straight, gay and the fluidity in between.
Though vanilla sex is the bogeyman here, I Want Your Sex does — surprisingly — stand more than a cat in hell’s chance of crossing over to discerning straight audiences, especially as Elliot’s adventures in S&M take him into increasingly surreal, Candide-like scenarios, like his encounter with a Frenchwoman that Erika sends him to seduce, and the cringe-inducing attempt at a threesome that nails the awkwardness that must often happen when people try to make their fantasies become real life. Forget the ball-gags, the dildos, and the vagina made of bubblegum, I Want Your Sex is surprisingly relatable at its core: Ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t have fallen in love with?
Title: I Want Your Sex
Festival: Sundance (Premieres)
Sales: Black Bear Pictures
Director: Gregg Araki
Screenwriters: Karley Sciortino, Gregg Araki
Cast: Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman, Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Daveed Diggs, Charli XCX
Running time: 1 hr 30 mins
