Can Gen Z and Gen X make it work together, sexually? Don’t millennials get to play as well? Is it possible to find a common starting point to build something … if not enduring, then something rewarding? Is this an evolution of Prince’s “U Got The Look” and its “boy versus girl in the World Series of love”? Sort of. I Want Your Sex is a film about power dynamics and hornitude and the questions we don’t often ask one another in a public forum, and thankfully, it’s a Gregg Araki film (along with co-writer Karley Sciortino), so it’s briskly paced, not afraid to deploy the groceries, and happy to plant some seeds in the lesser-traveled parts of the brain. Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman are along for the ride, broadening the canvas and leaving furniture to be professionally cleaned.
This is a film with a lot on its plate, aiming to mellow out Gen Z about sexual indecision but also making a point that Gen X talks a great game about being free and experimental even when there’s no coherent philosophy operating behind the scenes. There’s no big horny eureka here (not like in Araki’s 2010 film Kaboom, at least) — just a lot of ribald skirmishes that leave the viewer to keep score and figure out how they’ve been conducting themselves in the boudoir (or leatherette couch, or pool, or modern workplace). Plus one midcredits scene that raises the ante for interrogating the Gen X perspective on matrimony with a jaw-dropping flourish.
Wilde is very good as the artist Erika, a button-pusher quickly running out of buttons. We get the ongoing battle she’s fighting against the exterior world and its constant disdain for women who ford their own path, but we also understand the internal uncertainty that is eating her alive, trying to wring relevance out of a naughty reputation. (In a way, this is like a more naked version of The Christophers, which was released earlier this year.) It’s a gutsy performance that makes the audience work for it, just as effective as what Hoffman is doing but coming from a completely different cultural space. There’s something mercenary about Erika, both sexually and as a businessperson, and Wilde never softens the edges to make things easier for the audience. Hoffman is a revelation here, a cubby golden retriever of a sub who has boundless enthusiasm and a willingness to fling open doors and doff his drawers to figure out what sparks his joy.
Steven Soderbergh’s brisk, thoughtful new film opens this week at the Belcourt
Taking structural signposts equally from Sunset Boulevard and 9 ½ Weeks, this is very much in Araki’s wheelhouse. It’s a spicy ride that offers a lot to think about, as well as providing a continuum with which to evaluate one’s own sexual ways and means. Each of the supporting characters could star in their own film, with Mason Gooding vivisecting the kind of gay stereotypes that only gay people deploy, Araki/Catherine Breillat all-star Roxane Mesquida giving all the French business, and Charli XCX in another finely tuned but tiny (possibly ace) role that keeps the viewer wondering when she’s going to turn up again.
It’s not a home run, though, with some clangy moments that feel like they could have been dropped in mistakenly from a Bill Maher writers’ room. The same goes for a Roisin Murphy needle-drop. (Granted, her song “Something More” predates her virulent transphobic turn by almost three years, but it still breaks the mood.) Even in a plasticine adult fairy-tale land, there are still the little indications of the emotional brick wall of a world we live in. The fact that we’re never going to get a second season of the series Now Apocalypse is already cruel enough, one might think. But in the deeply repressed and unhappy moment we’re all stuck in, there is something genuinely freeing in this film, and it could very well do quite a bit of good.
