I Want Your Sex: Gregg Araki's plea to drop your pants and live a little

Gregg Araki has had one hell of a career. His debut film, The Living End, showed the promise of an angry queer man who came of age in the wake of the AIDS crisis, but as his career evolved, his anger turned to surrealism, sadness, and joy. While he still delivered intense, complex work in movies like Mysterious Skin, he also took on the stoner comedy with Smiley Face and one of the first movies to openly celebrate non-monogamy with the adorably sweet romantic comedy Splendor. His newest movie, I Want Your Sex, lands closer to Splendor in tone, but much like his more dramatic work, there still is an underlying message to be found.

I Want Your Sex wastes no time. The title immediately hits the screen as the audience is hurled into the scene of a dazed and bloodied young man in a bra and panty set stumbling out of a lavish house to find a naked woman floating face down in a pool. He quickly finds himself in an interrogation room having to explain to the police how his life in general got to this point. A title card takes us back 9 and ½ weeks, and with three cultural references in rapid succession (the titular George Michael hit, the body in the pool evoking Sunset Boulevard, and the kinky Mickey Rourke/Kim Basinger feature 9 ½ Weeks), a pop-culture savvy individual is ready for exactly the experience Araki is about to lay down. 

The young man is 23-year-old Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), unemployed and in a relationship with Minerva (Charli XCX), a seemingly emotionless college student with no time for or interest in sex, despite Elliot’s healthy appetite, but also seemingly no interest in him whatsoever. His roommate Apple (Chase Sui Wonders) keeps having to cover rent, but he has an interview with Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), an artist and provocateur who knows that her boisterous personality is as much of a product as her art, and that controversy is how an artist stays relevant and well-paid while they’re still alive. She was also the person he pulled out of the pool. After a brash interview with the boss directly, Elliot finds himself on the payroll, standing alongside a group of other employees as they find themselves subjected to the menial task of chewing gum and sticking it to a canvas to eventually form a vagina, a piece that just might be considered a bit too vulgar to be mentioned in the same breath as Georgia O’Keeffe. Erika is bold, stunning, and her entire image is built around sex. Elliot can’t stop thinking about her, and she knows it. She calls him into her office and quickly gets to business: she knows what he wants and she wants it too as long as there are no emotions attached. Then she makes him crawl across the floor to prove he wants it. A BDSM dynamic quickly develops, with Erika dominating the eager Elliot in ways he never could have fathomed considering how sexless his life was only a week ago. Restraints, degradation, deprivation, and much more are visited upon him in quick succession as he finds himself head-over-heels and completely unable to resist her every command, a playful dynamic that E.L. James couldn’t conjure on her best day at the keyboard.

He also befriends a co-worker, Zap (Mason Gooding), a beautifully chiseled gay man with incredible fashion sense who is sharp as a tack and equally as witty, a character that could be an obnoxious stereotype who is written so perfectly that he steals every scene that features him. He quickly breaks down Elliot’s failed attempt at “feeling connected” to the queer community (“Have you ever sucked a dick?” “...No.” “Congratulations, you’re straight”) and despite his colorful appearance, he represents the most grounded person in a life that is quickly turning upside down. Erika’s business manager, Vikktor (Daveed Diggs), knows what’s going on and continuously tries to tell Elliot that he’s just another in a long line of submissives that Erika has torn through like a sexual tornado. Despite her being around 20 years older than him and having all the life experience that he lacks, he’s still convinced that maybe he’ll be the exception to the rule.

As quickly as ecstasy overtakes Elliot’s dull life, things start to turn sideways. His relationship with Minerva is a joke. Erika tries to offer him up as a plaything to an elegant French friend as his poor social skills tank what could be a passionate encounter for someone with a little more experience and charisma. Erika even withholds affection from him just long enough that when she relents, she tells him that he has to bring a friend for a threesome. In his desperation, he hastily recruits Apple and the two fumble their way to her lavish home and potential disaster. Erika has him wrapped around her finger, and despite her constant, and increasingly more public humiliations, he keeps coming back for more.

With the framing device of the interrogation, the mystery that kicks off this tale of passion never quite goes away, but the movie is more of an erotic romantic comedy than the erotic thriller it could be. The interrogating officers are Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville, turning in surprisingly reserved performances in roles that are essentially extended cameos, but it’s still nice to see them over a pair of unknowns. Despite the jarring intro, this is not a tale of tragedy. It’s an open plea from 66-year-old Gregg Araki to the youth of today, a generation that is apparently finding sex, both in movies and in real life, uninteresting to say the least. As a queer elder who has carried the cinematic torch of sexual freedom for over 30 years, he wants the kids to know that it’s not just fun to get naked with someone, but it’s important. Awkward hook-ups with friends, strangers, co-workers, bosses, one-night-stands, these are the most formative of social interactions in an increasingly disconnected world, but through it all, you will come out the other side stronger and more assured of who you are than the person you were a year ago.

Doubling back to the title, it’s an interesting choice for those who know the history of the George Michael hit, which itself is not actually featured in the movie (although it does have history with cinema, being one of several hits debuting on the soundtrack for 1987’s Beverly Hills Cop II.) George Michael spent the ‘80s as a heartthrob, breaking out in the pop group Wham! before going solo. The song was the debut single for his first solo album, Faith, and it perfectly represented the dichotomy of his entire existence at the time. His image was that of a man who every woman wanted but he couldn’t be tied down, although every girl with MTV thought that maybe she could be the one to change that. The music video for this song changed everything as he got steamy with his girlfriend at the time, Kathy Jeung. Amidst fears that the song could be promoting promiscuity as AIDS had a stranglehold on a society where free love felt like a relic from the ‘60s, Michael used a tube of lipstick to write the words “EXPLORE MONOGAMY” on Kathy’s body. While the song was catchy, campy, and now considered a classic, everything about this presentation was a lie. While Michael and Jeung were in a relationship, Kathy was more enamored with George than he was with her. He privately identified as bisexual at the time (later recognizing that women were of little interest to him), and had a boyfriend that he was far more in love with. George Michael was promoting the image (one that many saw through easily) that he was a heterosexual man in love with a woman despite being a gay man who freely tookwhatever lover interested him. While his sexual orientation never comes into play, Elliot’s sexless, vanilla relationship is just as much of a lie, one that even he believes until he learns that there are just too many opportunities in this world to take the first hand you’re dealt because you think that’s the best that things will ever get.

This is my favorite movie so far this year. It’s kinky, sweet, and playful, but just a little dangerous, an ode to the mistakes you make as a rite of passage because someone relentlessly hot and way out of your league has you wrapped around their finger, and how those mistakes don’t destroy your life, but rather help make you the best version of who you’ll end up being. Cooper Hoffman has a similar appeal to his father, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, and he comes across as totally natural and relatable to any awkward youth who had to learn the ropes to romance the hard way compared to a more traditionally attractive lead. Olivia Wilde gives one hell of a performance here, as captivating to the viewer as she is to Elliot. Having already been an outspoken proponent of sexuality in cinema, Erika seems to almost be written for her, somewhat recalling the chaos surrounding the making of her sophomore directorial effort, Don’t Worry Darling, during which her relationship with a younger co-star brought chaos that distracted from the art that was supposed to be the focal point. She’s stunning, cunning, and calculated here, and it’s easy to imagine that any audience member could fall into the same trap as Elliot. I know I would.

I Want Your Sex lives with one foot in reality and one firmly planted in the surreal, ready to shift into an animated dream sequence at any turn, and you should see it while you can, if you can, wherever you can. It’s made by a master of his craft and deserves that big screen, a beautifully shot, candy-colored feast for the eyes in an age where everything seems dull and underlit. Make Gregg proud. See it then go home with a stranger. Bang a platonic friend. Make some god damned mistakes. Have a night you’ll remember forever in the name of art and cinema and being young (or young enough) and stupid. This movie exists as an appeal to the youth of today to not miss out on those experiences, a reminder that maybe another sexual revolution is just what this exhausting point in history needs.

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