RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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The year is 2026, all of the most popular right-wing influencers are proud virgins who love Hitler, and it's up to a 66-year-old filmmaker to remind the young people of America that it's OK to be horny. I don't entirely understand how we got here, but I'm glad that Gregg Araki is doing something about it.
The first movie he's made since "White Bird in a Blizzard" was released 12 years ago, and the first movie he's made that feels like a movie he's made since the similarly garish but more entrancingly self-possessed " Kaboom " in 2010, "I Want Your Sex" is nothing less than a half-naked prayer for Gen Z to go out and — consensually! — fuck each other without fear of getting hurt. Related Stories Ryan Gosling and David Jonsson Are Superheroes Now. Is Marvel Finally Putting People Over IP? You've Never Met a Horror Host Like 2017's Cryptina: The Luminous Ghost of Short Films Past
Not because they won't get hurt (the film's 23-year-old protagonist is introduced bleeding from every hole on his face while his naked boss floats face-down in a nearby pool), but rather because they almost definitely will. Because there's something beautiful and necessary to being honest about what they really want, even if getting it proves complicated. "I Want Your Sex" pleads with its target demographic to transcend the psychic trauma of coming of age in an increasingly digital world where nobody feels safe being seen for who they are. To appreciate that taking risks, acting like a total fool, and otherwise making hilariously bad decisions in the pursuit of desire can be one of lust's greatest rewards so long as people are willing to learn about themselves in the process.
For one thing, her shitty art makes Jeff Koons look like Georgia O'Keefe, which helps to explain why it's so lucrative. For another, her latest hire is an ideal plaything: A fresh-faced but rudderless people-pleaser who's so afraid of getting in trouble that he'd cross any line Erika asked him to even if she wasn't a radiant sex monster with alien cheekbones, an endless variety of latex power suits, and a tantalizing backstory that may or may not have involved fucking Vince Gallo at the New York premiere of "The Brown Bunny."
His name is Elliot (an endearingly guileless Cooper Hoffman ), and he's never been more starved for female attention than he is now that he has a hot but frigid med student girlfriend (Charli xcx) who has no interest in taking her clothes off.
Over the course of nine-and-a-half weeks, Elliot becomes the latest in Erika's presumably long line of so-called sex slaves. The dynamic between them suggests a gender-swapped riff on "Secretary" (if also much goofier than that comparison might imply), as Erika blithely abuses her power in much the same way that men have been doing around the office since there have been offices to do that around. Their S&M-flavored trysts are more comic than carnal (most encounters find Erika clad in leather underwear as she prepares to insert something up Elliot's ass), but Araki isn't hoping to make audiences horny so much as he's trying to make them appreciate how — in Zillennial parlance — being horny doesn't have to be all that serious.
It's obvious that the affair won't end with wedding bells, but "I Want Your Sex" displays a ton of affection for both of these characters, even when they're fucking each other in less enjoyable ways. There's a tentative but sincere honesty in the arrangement between them, one that allows a few errant peeks at the "real" Erika that resides underneath her sociopathic exterior, and seduces Elliot closer and closer towards understanding his own comfort level in playing her wicked games. Does he enjoy Erika poking around his prostate, or is he lying to himself in order to continue being of use to her? It's hard to say, as Erika is clear about what she wants — and why — in a way that Elliot has never allowed himself to be in his life, but if Elliot might want something more traditional out of this arrangement, it's perversely sweet to see these two expose themselves to each other bit by bit. It's toxic as hell, of course, but that isn't the end of the world.
A big part of the fun is in watching Elliot suffer and grow from the consequences of his own timidity ("You're all dying to fuck but you're too chickenshit to admit it" is how Erika diagnoses his generation), as he does when he cajoles his flustered roommate and best friend Apple into an emergency three-way with his boss. A buzzingly insecure tomboy played by "The Studio" breakout Chase Sui Wonders (whose pent-up performance here is both the funniest and most heartfelt thing in the entire movie), Apple isn't sure if she hates dick or simply doesn't like the ones she's tried; in the film's most fraught and affecting scene, Erika gives her a golden opportunity to find out.
Raucous but rife with suppressed feeling, it's the kind of sequence that "I Want Your Sex" needed a lot more of, as many of the film's one-liners and self-contained visual gags are stale and labored in a way that stifles Araki's enduringly transgressive spirit. It doesn't help that this is the most visually stilted of the director's work, and, in what amounts to a more damning commentary on the film industry at large than it is on Araki's ability to defy it, the first of his films that fails to make its cheapness feel like a feature instead of a bug.
The main cast is a bit too Hollywood to complement the movie's outsider spirit (even if Wilde and Hoffman are fully on board with the Araki of it all), and — Wonders notwithstanding — the supporting players aren't given much of a chance to compensate for that. "Fat Girl" star Roxane Mesquida suffocates amid the airlessness of the one, sitcom-worthy scene in which she appears. Mason Gooding is another actor who has screen presence to spare, but his trust fund dilettante — Elliot's only real ally at Erika's gallery — never evolves beyond the sassy gay slut archetype that we've seen a millio...
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