There are few filmmakers whose name is as synonymous with sexual provocation as Gregg Araki. For more than three decades, Araki has been poking, prodding, and occasionally setting fire to the boundaries of sex, queerness, and good taste. In his latest film – his first feature after a twelve-year hiatus – Araki returns with a lot to say about Gen Z’s increasingly puritanical attitude to sex. I Want Your Sex is a provocative, darkly comic film that is less interested in shocking its audience than asking why we have become so uncomfortable with sex in the first place.
The film opens on a scene that immediately evokes Sunset Boulevard: a woman lies face down and naked in a swimming pool, while a bloodied young man in pink lingerie looks on. It is an arresting introduction to a story that then rewinds nine and a half weeks, gradually revealing the events that led to this bizarre scene.
Cooper Hoffman plays Elliot, a directionless 23-year-old who finds himself working for Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), a celebrated contemporary artist whose work is as sexually explicit as her personality is uncompromising. When Erika chooses Elliot as her latest assistant and muse, he is drawn into an increasingly complicated world of sexual experimentation, artistic obsession and power games.
Olivia Wilde is at a career best as Erika, bringing an impressive combination of charisma, menace and absurdity to a character who seems to regard social boundaries as little more than creative suggestions. She is deliberately excessive, but Wilde understands that Erika’s appeal depends upon there being something genuinely compelling beneath the provocation.
Hoffman, meanwhile, provides the perfect counterpoint. Elliot’s relative innocence makes him an ideal audience surrogate as he attempts to navigate Erika’s unconventional world. His discomfort provides much of the film’s humour, particularly as his fascination with Erika’s lifestyle gradually competes with his growing awareness of its dangers.
If I Want Your Sex has a central thesis, it is essentially this: sex is good, repression is bad, power is complicated, and everyone involved is probably an idiot.
Araki has always been interested in the collision between sex and social convention, but here he turns his attention towards what he sees as a new era of sexual squeamishness. Erika is appalled by “woke culture” and what she perceives as Gen Z’s cautious attitude towards sex, while Elliot is simultaneously horrified (and fascinated) by her anything-goes philosophy. The resulting generational culture war works so well because neither side comes out looking sane.
I Want Your Sex is colourful, stylised and deliberately excessive, with the director’s familiar fascination with heightened sexuality and subversive imagery on full display. Yet there is something noticeably more restrained about the film than some of his earlier work. This is not the nihilistic, confrontational Araki of The Doom Generation or Nowhere. Instead, the provocation is packaged within a more accessible and playful comedy-thriller.
The film may not possess quite the same bite as Araki’s most celebrated work, but that does not mean it is without teeth. Its greatest achievement may be that it manages to make sexual repression seem almost as strange as the sexual excess that it is reacting to. I Want Your Sex is not quite the transgressive experience that the title promises. But is it funny, colourful, and gloriously weird?
Absolutely it is.
And sometimes you don’t need cinema to change your life. Sometimes you just need Olivia Wilde to crack a whip at Cooper Hoffman while Gregg Araki asks why everyone has suddenly become so scared of sex.
I Want Your Sex is in cinemas on August 28
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