‘I Want Your Sex’ Review: Olivia Wilde Cracks The Whip In Gregg Araki’s Cheerfully Naughty Comedy

Alongside other filmmakers who could be grouped, at least back then, under the New Queer Cinema banner (Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant and Rose Troche, to name just a few), Gregg Araki made his name in the first half of the ’90s with irreverent, hypersexualized, low-budget films like The Living End, Totally Fucked Up and The Doom Generation, among others. His last film to command any real cultural attention was probably Mysterious Skin (2004). Since then he has made precious little cinema, spending much of his time in television and becoming a touchstone for younger directors like Jane Schoenbrun, a self-professed admirer.

Twelve years after his last feature, Araki is back with I Want Your Sex, a sexually provocative comedy built around the strange bond between a boundary-pushing avant-garde artist and a young employee of her studio. Olivia Wilde plays Erika Tracy, a conceptual artist whose work draws on ideas about sex and who, unsurprisingly, is just as eager to practice every variety of it herself. She also holds the contemporary art world around her in open contempt and insists that all she cares about is making money. Cooper Hoffman (yes, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son, now well into his twenties) plays Elliot, a college student who starts out as an intern in her studio.

The film opens at a dramatic moment and then doubles back. We see Elliot waking up after some kind of party, dressed in women’s underwear, wandering into the garden to look for Erika and finding her, apparently dead, in the pool. How did it come to this? Using Elliot’s account to two police officers (played by comedians Johnny Knoxville and Margaret Cho) as its frame, the film reconstructs events from the beginning. We watch Elliot’s job interview, in which the woman unsettles and fascinates him in equal measure with her overt, faintly aggressive sensuality, until she hires him. Elliot doesn’t understand a thing that’s happening, but he says yes anyway.

Soon enough Erika starts «using» him, or drawing him into a rather improper arrangement (they are boss and employee, after all) of high sexual intensity. It’s clear that to Erika, Elliot is just one of many, but he gets hooked on the presence and appetites of his boss and lover, all the more so because his own relationship, with a girlfriend played by none other than Charli XCX, seems to treat sex as little more than a contractual obligation. While Erika prepares a new show and coworkers (Daveed Diggs and Mason Gooding among them) look on with some irritation, she invites him to bring her best friend, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders), into the mix, which turns out to be every bit as awkward as it sounds.

I Want Your Sex works as a comic thriller, a light-footed film that approaches sexuality with a freedom that younger audiences may find a bit politically incorrect. In fact, that is one of the running arguments between Erika and Elliot. She belongs to a generation that tried to squeeze everything it could out of sex (carefully, she is quick to add), while his does not. «They’d rather spend all day playing video games,» she scoffs. He attempts a reply, but deep down he doesn’t have one. All he wants is for this fascinating affair, which has shown him things he never imagined, to go on forever. We know it won’t.

Beyond its sex scenes, which are bold only in context, the film is a pop comedy with echoes of Almodóvar and John Waters, thanks above all to an aesthetic that is deeply queer even though the relationship at its center is, details aside, heterosexual. It doesn’t wade into questions like the age gap, and it doesn’t reckon much with the potential abuse of power in this arrangement. For Araki, those are precisely the concerns that have drained the fun out of talking about sex and putting it on screen. In that spirit, Wilde’s performance surprises with its looseness and freshness and, of course, its dominatrix-style wardrobe. Hoffman, for his part, looks very comfortable playing a man who can’t believe the string of situations he keeps finding himself in.

At heart, I Want Your Sex is a classically minded comedy, a good deal less provocative than its subject matter suggests. What’s disruptive about Araki’s film has more to do with a climate in which sex is barely discussed or filmed than with anything the movie itself has to say.