Gregg Araki returns to feature filmmaking with I Want Your Sex.
It's led by Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman.
Circling a dom-sub relationship, the film feels more dated than it initially lets on.
Gregg Araki shifted the very canvas, redrew the map of queer cinema. So, it especially breaks my heart to report his new outing, his feature film return in over a decade, I Want Your Sex, offers possibly the most straight, dated imagination of kink possible in today’s age. It’s tepid, disappointing and frequently flat. Araki launches a salvo on Gen-Z’s alleged distancing from sex via a neo artist, Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde). She’s exuberant about sex fueling every ounce of her personality, her artistic expression. Her diametric opposite is her new assistant, Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), who fumbles and is severely underconfident in presenting himself. It doesn’t take long for her to suck him into her pit. When he’s grilled if he was groomed by Erika, he denies, insisting whatever they did together was mutually consensual. When Erika first talks to him, she chides him for making a pass. He’s startled. This is where the film shoots off from impropriety, shame and sexual autonomy.
She knows he has a girlfriend (Charli XCX), but pitches a relationship outside professional boundaries. She questions his generation’s sexual conservatism, underlining how she’s erotically driven in every pore of her being. Via perky dom-sub montages, Araki gives free rein to his actors in charting wicked fantasies. But these escapades get diffuse as the film races forth. They aren’t hooked to solid characterization. Rather, familiar grouses accompanying an age-gap romance rise. They strip away the glossy façade to expose something far more modest and cautious. Elliot is intimidated but is unable not to fall in line with whatever Erika instructs him to do. He crawls up to her, servicing her most passing whims, desperate for himself to be given some degree of currency and validation.
Wilde gleefully relishes every snarky glare, each line and excoriating judgement on contemporary art, which she calls “a trace element of the trajectory of fame”. It’s too absorbed in celebrity status even as she condones how she herself plugs her aesthetic mode with self-inflatedness. The problem here is how Araki pegs the sexually exploratory onto conversational collisions and few experiments. But how does it factor into individual maturity and expression? Just as Erika doesn’t transcend a blinding archetype, Elliot’s growth is confined to magically catalyzed work promotion. However, a space for self-reflection is barely found. I Want Your Sex aims for exaggeration, a visual prancing, but its latter piggybacking on a regular relationship’s beats tends to take off the shine.
For all its projected transgression, this film is far milder than it’d like to believe. It’s heavy on spiel but struggles to translate it into anything bracing, daring or revelatory. Araki makes pointless detours about Elliot’s girlfriend, none of which improves on the earlier or brings fresh insight. Disruptiveness is confined solely to Erika’s lofty, sex-positive diatribes against Elliot’s stuttering tentativeness. Wilde has way more fun than what the film has accorded her, bringing vim, fire and mischief. That teasing glimmer in her eyes as Erika plots how to move with Elliot is worth the entry alone. Araki revels in having found an actress who’s infinitely more playful, surprising and inscrutable than what the filmic schema lends the character. Ironically, the film possesses the very wariness around taboo and perversion which Erika tears into.
The screenplay, which Araki co-wrote with Karley Sciortino, seems too coy to dive through obvious questions of power, manipulation and assertion tangled with the central relationship. It flinches and retreats from those implications, resigning them merely to verbal suggestions tossed summarily. Even the sauciness that spatters intimate montages is in short supply. Ultimately, I Want Your Sex deviates from initial rebellious promise to conventional expectation. Elliot grudges Erika for not regarding him with old-school affection and care when she’d never held those as primary to their relationship. He brings the same assumptions which she dismissed early on. He’s young and can’t resist the presupposed conditioning. Araki wants to intervene here about how Erika is making him mold his identity but we don’t really encounter that growth. Like the case for Wilde, Hoffman is more earnest than what the film engineers.
Sex is power play. Araki winks into the mess it spawns yet steadies himself at a considerate remove. I Want Your Sex sorely needed an edge, a lurking danger to fully spice up the deal. Where's the sense of situations lurching, the tangle of sickening feelings? Araki weaves it in for a latter point, but it's too little, too late and terribly predictable. This lack turns the drama de-fanged, meandering and arbitrary.
I Want Your Sex opens in the United States on July 31.
