It isn’t every day we get to comment on a Gregg Araki movie! I remember seeing his last title White Bird In A Blizzard on a rainy afternoon screening at the 2014 Vancouver International Film Festival. Both Paul Gratton and myself take a look at his latest film, I Want Your Sex.
ABOUT: I Want Your Sex follows naive young assistant Elliot as he becomes the sexual muse and submissive to provocative conceptual artist Erika Tracy, leading them into a dangerous world of obsession, power dynamics, betrayal, and murder.
Paul’s Reaction: Sex has largely disappeared from today’s motion picture screens. In the 1970s, even major studios like Columbia, 20th Century-Fox and Paramount would release soft core porn films like Emmanuelle and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls if they thought there was money to be made. Serious artists also explored human sexuality in films such as Midnight Cowboy (X-rated at the time it won the Oscar for Best Picture), Carnal Knowledge, Last Tango in Paris, Shampoo, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, to name just a few. But as visual depictions of sexual activity have largely been relegated to the masturbatory dark corners of the internet, and violence has replaced lust as the main on-screen mode of human interaction, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to Olivia Wilde, who has single-handedly put a bit of sizzle back into this summer’s multiplex offerings. In The Invite, which she directed, she brilliantly dissects a sexually troubled marriage, by introducing a liberated couple from next door who are into partner swapping. The resulting mayhem is funny and painfully honest at the same time. And now she arrives with I Want Your Sex, playing a character that is the polar opposite of the mousy, sexually insecure housewife in The Invite. She plays Erika Tracy, a super successful and pretentious artist who seems to always know exactly what she wants when she enters a room. When she takes on a new assistant, her naturally dominant side emerges as she grooms a naive and sexually inexperienced new hire into becoming her all-too-willing apprentice submissive. Gay cult director Gregg Araki, who hasn’t released a new movie in twelve years (working mostly in television) directs the whole thing with humour and the wink of an eye, even as the leather-clad, blonde-wigged Wilde steals scene after scene. The best sequence actually involves a forced threesome, as Erika demands that her sub show up with another plaything in tow or she will cut him off from her bountiful gifts of pain and humiliation, which he has come to crave. The best he can come up with on short notice is his platonic roommate/landlord, well payed by Chase Sui Wonders, who delivers some genuinely human reactions to the pre-ordained role playing that bdsm relies on. The superficiality of the art world is an easy target of course, and at times Araki resorts to a sitcom-winky approach to the material (BDSM seems to amuse gay filmmakers to no small degree, see the more psychologically insightful Pillion from earlier this year). That may be why both the Cannes and the Venice film festivals turned down this naughty bit of fluff; the film premiered at Sundance, with Americans far more shocked at the content than the Europeans would ever have been. But watching Olivia Wilde take charge in full femdom mode is undeniably a delightful pleasure to watch, and she provides a much needed sprinkle of spicy silliness in a summer at the movies that has been otherwise way too prim and proper.
Rating: 6 out of 10
Jason’s Reaction: This is a surprising downer of a movie that made me feel a bit strange while watching it; I WANT YOUR SEX feels like it wants to be a satire on the art industry, LGBT issues and also a look at sexual politics in the workplace – but not much of it really works here despite some really wonderful performances by some of my favourite actors working today.
Perhaps it was the depiction of the sexual harassment and dominance in the workplace that put me off; sure, a lot of this is a type of satire about how power in positions can be put over their employees but a lot of it I feel wouldn’t actually happen, and the movie is a bit complicated with too many characters all crashing over each other. The movie keeps cutting through timelines where we see investigations by police that could have easily figured this out in two seconds, and after a while there were so many twists and turns into violence that I just kind of gave up.
With that said, I admire Olivia Wilde here for being rather fearless here and especially how she commands every room she is in. Cooper Hoffman is always reliable with one of the best “acting is reacting” faces currently in the cinema (I’m excited to see audiences discover him in the TIFF/SxSW movie Poetic License coming out in September which features some of his very best work), and Chase Sui Wonders equally nails the strange reactions as his roommate who gets pulled into the action. Yet some of the other performances here are baffling, in particular Charli XCX as the worst girlfriend on the face of the earth, a performance that just seems so strange in comparison to the many other movies she has been in this year.
Like with some of Araki’s movies I tend to just get bored with it all pretty quickly – many scenes are either over-directed or there JUST isn’t enough in the scene to hold my attention. Some of his earlier movies like The Doom Generation I watched, enjoyed but never felt like I wanted to see again. For I Want Your Sex, I admired seeing some great actors here in a somewhat silly exercise.
Rating: 5 out of 10
