This story originally appeared on Them.
When I first heard that I Want Your Sex was going to be Gregg Araki’s response to the widely discussed phenomenon of Gen Z’s relative celibacy, I felt equally trepidatious and excited. As a member of that generation (albeit on the older end), I’m always a little wary of any kind of broad, sweeping criticism coming from our predecessors. At the same time, it is factually true that Gen Z is having significantly less sex than prior generations, and if there were any filmmaker equipped to address that deficit, it would be the legendary New Queer Cinema pioneer. Thankfully, I Want Your Sex largely pulls it off — and marks a triumphant return to form for the director’s first feature length film in 12 years.
Directed by Araki from a screenplay written by himself and Karley Sciortino, the movie stars Olivia Wilde as the wildly successful contemporary artist Erika Tracy, opposite Cooper Hoffman as Elliot, a young man whom she hires as an assistant, even though he doesn’t quite have the same uber-cool vibe as everyone else in the studio. It becomes clear pretty quickly that this seems to be a large part of the reason why Elliot was hired in the first place: Erika, whose art is all about sex to a comical degree, seems hungry for someone to corrupt. And Elliot, who’s in a dead relationship with his girlfriend Minerva (played excellently by Charli XCX), is all too eager to be Erika’s prey. The two begin a Dom/sub relationship, with Erika holding all the power and gradually coaxing Elliot into increasingly wild sexual scenarios. It would be all too easy to conclude that the relationship between the two is inherently problematic, but because this is an Araki flick, things aren’t so straightforward. That’s true even just in terms of form: The movie begins with Elliot, dazed and bloody, stumbling upon a dead body in a pool, and the story largely unfolds in the form of flashbacks as he is questioned by the police (played by the iconic duo of Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville).
The police interrogation format is particularly effective in providing a forum for the many questions raised by the ethically thorny nature of the film’s central relationship. Elliot himself tells the cops that his relationship with Erika was “100% consensual” — but what does that mean when he is both significantly younger than her and working as her assistant? What are the implications of playing with power dynamics when the difference between the two of them is already so heightened? Occasionally, Erika’s character borders on slightly too didactic — she’s very clearly Araki’s self-insert, delivering numerous treatises on sex as a driving force of her work, and bemoaning the younger generation’s puritanism. But thankfully, the movie largely leaves these questions unanswered, something that Araki has said was the point. In a recent interview with IndieWire, the director expressed a hope “that people will have a good time and be entertained, but also leave the theater and start to talk about it, argue about it, get into fights about it.”
And yes, I Want Your Sex is, perhaps most importantly, an incredibly entertaining summer movie. Hoffman and Wilde’s performances are both pitch-perfect, thoroughly embodying the Gen Z Nice Guy and the jaded Gen Xer. The sex scenes are sometimes hot, sometimes hilarious, and sometimes both at once, just like sex in real life. Despite the film’s edgy premise, this is arguably Araki at his most mainstream, though it’s also clearly a love letter to longtime fans. (There’s one particular cameo in the third act that I won’t spoil, but it made myself and many other people in attendance at my screening gasp and clap with delight.)
Is it a perfect movie? Certainly not. The last third in particular, as with many of Araki’s films, feels a little too rushed. But it’s also clearly not a movie that’s taking itself too seriously. Imperfections and all, it’s a thrill to see Araki’s signature queer punk flair back on the big screen.
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