Gregg Araki described Olivia Wilde as “a true old-time movie star” at the Sundance premiere of his film I Want Your Sex at Sundance last night, and it wasn’t hard to see why, even though the movie in question largely requires Wilde to play a flamboyant, foulmouthed, sex-crazed artist in various BDSM get-ups. The actress has always stood out when she’s been allowed to go big, and as controversial artist Erika Tracy, a self-described “pretentious bitch from hell,” she gets what might be her best part yet. This is a woman who instantly peppers her newest assistant, the unassuming Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), with all sorts of inappropriate questions, and within a week of hiring him turns him into a sex toy, making him crawl on the floor of her office, tying him up, spanking him, dressing him up in leather and women’s clothing — just about all of it to his incessant delight. Of course she’s his boss, and of course it’s all totally outrageous and wrong. “But in a way, that’s what made it so hot,” Elliot says.
Wilde can turn the most out-there line into an afterthought. Listen to the spectacular nonchalance with which she says, “Fine, I’ll fuck you, but you have to bring someone who will open your ass for me.” Or when she passes Elliot off to an out-of-town associate, with a “Screw her real good, but don’t let her penetrate you, she’s not that close a friend.” Erika’s a great, outsize character, and she’s also an avatar for Araki’s many gleeful provocations. She rails against the sexless prudery of Generation Z, she has endless contempt for workplace decorum, and she says things like, “Sex is everything. It’s also nothing,” which sounds like a lot of hooey at first but might actually summarize Araki’s cinematic vision of sex quite well. (To read more on Araki, do check out my colleague E. Alex Jung’s excellent 2019 interview with him.)
This could all easily get tiresome quite quickly, but the director has a light touch thanks to his poppy, direct style — colorful close-ups, broad line deliveries, simple cuts. His candy-colored aesthetic once felt New Wave-y, then it felt music video-y, and now it feels like it could easily belong to the Instagram era; he’s somehow always been an outsider but never quite out of fashion. And there’s a wink-wink levity to I Want Your Sex (note the title) that tells us not to take any of it too seriously, even though the filmmaker himself is being quite candid. He’s found a lovely match here between Wilde’s sexual dragon and Hoffman’s wide-eyed docility. The young man barely changes over the course of their relationship. Despite all she’s done to him, and despite his insistence that he’s become obsessed with her, he still comes off as an affable innocent, attentive and awkward. Mason Gooding and Chase Sui Wonders provide fine support along the way: He plays Elliot’s gay, sexually adventurous co-worker, and she plays his eternally frustrated and far more responsible roommate and best friend; both serve as a kind of oppositional Greek chorus to the ongoing insanity of Erika and Elliot’s relationship.
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The film falters, however, once something resembling an actual plot kicks in. Araki tends to handle melodrama in straight-forward, uncomplicated ways, but he’s situated I Want Your Sex as a kind of noirish send-up, opening with what appears to be a tragic scenario and then flashing back, Sunset Boulevard-style. But the final act feels more like the director being torn away from his real interests to tend to a not particularly convincing narrative conclusion, complete with half-baked twists and just enough cautionary-tale moralizing to make the movie’s delightful derangements go down a bit easier for modern audiences. It feels like a misstep, but it also doesn’t really matter, especially within the film’s devil-may-care sensibility. The director and his cast are clearly having so much fun, and that fun carries through to the audience. Who ultimately cares if they don’t quite stick the landing?
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