Review: I Want Your Sex

Director:  Gregg Araki

Stars:  Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman, Chase Sui Wonders

There’s a box under my bed with an assortment of CDs I’ve held onto over the years, mostly label compilations and mixes I wouldn’t be able to find either on record or faithfully recreated on whatever streaming platform. Among these is a double-CD of early-to-mid 2000s electroclash tunes called Futurism; a lush mix of plasticated electro club bangers with so-over-it vocal lines evocative of a kind of bored sexual ambivalence between socialites and art debutantes. Cuts and remixes by Felix Da Housecat. Adult. Ladytron. Maybe you had to be there, maybe you just need a high tolerance for it, but it’s a fucking great listen. I should dig it out sometime.

Gregg Araki’s latest movie I Want Your Sex seems timed for some kind of electroclash revival, or maybe it just imagines one. Either way the 66-year-old veteran of the New Queer Cinema movement of the ’90s seems moved to try and throw a hand grenade into Gen Z’s culture of sexual timidity, reconstituting the erotic thriller staple of a BDSM power dynamic between boss and employee into a gaudy light entertainment escapade, cushioning the material with a totally-not-serious attitude. After a cold open with a body in a swimming pool riffing slightly on Sunset Blvd., we zip back in time 9 and a half weeks (natch) so that 23-year-old Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) can tell the whole story. Just out of school and living in a pastel apartment with his bestie Apple (Chase Sui Wonders), Elliot scores a low-paying administrative role at a high-end art studio belonging to Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilder). Tracy’s schtick is an ultra-sexualised brand of neo-pop horseshit, and the suggestion inferred is that she’s long past her best work.

It’s surprising, to say the least, when polite, scruffy Elliot finds himself propositioned by his new boss, a woman who openly describes herself as a “pretentious whore from hell”. Dissatisfied in his sexless, emotionless relationship with medical student Minerva (Charli xcx), Elliot struggles with the morality of cheating for all of about five seconds before falling head-over-heels into the role of Erika’s dutiful sub. His more experienced colleagues (Mason Gooding, Daveed Diggs) have seen this all before. Erika evidently has a cycle she likes to perpetuate.

When Elliot wears a Madonna t-shirt the association doesn’t feel entirely immaterial, girl. One suspects he’s always had a thing for older women and, as Araki toys with sexual fantasies, the Oedipal element of Elliot’s infatuation barely contains itself. His most explosive orgasm with Minerva occurs while he’s imagining Erika promising to make him breakfast every day.

It continues to be a pleasure watching Hoffman mature into an actor of serious credibility. I Want Your Sex feels like a warped extension of the part he played for Paul Thomas Anderson in Licorice Pizza, albeit more nakedly committed to bedroom experimentation. Araki takes his potshots at the over-sensitive youth, and Erika proves a perfect devil’s advocate through which to practice his ventriloquism. Wilde, for her part, clearly relishes such an outre character.

As naive as Elliot seems, he is frequently the more mature person in this ethically dubious interchange. Certainly he’s more sensitive to the emotional complexities of sex. Araki scrutinises our propensity for self-destruction when Elliot drags a semi-willing, semi-drunk Apple into an uncomfortable threeway situation at Erika’s command, detonating one of the most crucial relationships in his life in the process. One of the bigger letdowns of I Want Your Sex, actually, is how flippantly it then discards Sui Wonders’ character. Araki, seemingly unsure how to tidy up this mess, ends on a succession of silly codas. I was left wondering what had happened to Apple.

We desperately need more sex in movies. Babygirl took to the subject seriously, also itemising an inverse office power dynamic, but audiences balked at being asked to entertain the ideas with any weight (certainly they did in the screening I attended). Later this week, the dreaded sexless ‘Sex Purge’ movie One Night Only hits UK cinemas (for my sins and out of morbid curiosity, I’ve booked a ticket…). Araki’s dedication to flippancy, proffering I Want Your Sex toward us as his ‘poppest’ (sic) movie to date seems like a happy medium. An opportunity to talk about and show sex as an adult subject without freaking out an increasingly prudish young audience. The attempt is laudable but the result a little unfocused and quick to flee from anything genuinely messy (see Apple’s sudden, disappointing exit). The movie is effortlessly quotable and frequently funny but, like Araki’s last major feature – 2014’s White Bird in a Blizzard – it feels like the edges have been deliberately softened. The seismic rawness of his foundational bangers like The Living End, The Doom Generation and Nowhere isn’t much in evidence here.

But that’s what happens when we get older. It’s a natural, predictable progression. When it doesn’t that kind of arrested development can be exceedingly grating (Johnny Knoxville guests here in a commendably restrained role). You can still sense a little of the rascal provocateur in Araki, but he’s got much less to prove nowadays, and the priority has evidently shifted to making something fun. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does place him in a space similar to his dragon boss Erika Tracy; slightly tone deaf to the emotional reality of his increasingly silly story.

Still, there’s Ladytron on the soundtrack, so I’m back ready to reach for that electroclash CD.