(Gregg Araki, 2026, USA, 90 minutes)
Part One: Gregg and Olivia
Sex is natural, sex is good
Not everybody does it
But everybody should
–George Michael, "I Want Your Sex" (1987)
It's been 12 years since iconoclastic director Gregg Araki's last feature film, White Bird in a Blizzard, with Shailene Woodley and Eva Green. Since 1987, he used to release a film every two to three years on average, and then he just stopped. I couldn't say whether it was due to a lack of funding, a lack of inspiration, or something else, but it's great to have him back.
Not that Araki ever went away, he just shifted to TV. He even created his own series, Now Apocalypse, for the Starz network, but it only lasted for one season (author and actress Karley Sciortino, the co-writer, also co-wrote I Want Your Sex). Considering that the uncharacteristically downbeat White Bird, an adaptation of Laura Kasischke's 2013 novel, wasn't his best work, I suspect he may have needed time to regroup, rethink, and recharge.
Which brings us to I Want Your Sex with Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman. It premiered in Seattle at SIFF along with Wilde's acclaimed (and improved) adaptation of Spanish writer/director Cesc Gay's The Invite, which closed out the festival and continues at the Uptown through Aug 13. Both films are sex comedies, though Wilde's relies more on talk than action, and her sex-starved character is considerably less adventurous than Penélope Cruz's sexologist.
I was drawn to Araki's film by the director, but also by the actors, not least because I wasn't sure how a sex comedy with that pairing would work.
Well, the good news is that it does. The weird news is that Wilde already lived out an older woman-younger man scenario in public a few years ago.
At this point, I should mention that the average age of an Araki protagonist is 24; the youngest was Midnight Skin's 16-year-old Brady Corbet and the oldest was Nowhere's 31-year-old Rachel True. At 42, Wilde is the oldest by far, but lest Araki, 67, seem like a complete ageist, he hired Roscoe Lee Brown, 84, to narrate 2007's Smiley Face. It was Browne's final film.
In Araki's film, Wilde plays Erika Tracy, the boss, and Hoffman plays Elliot, her employee. There's a 20-year difference between the two, but it isn't just about age or gender, but power: Erika has all of it, and Elliot has none.
While working on Don't Worry Darling, her followup to 2019's Booksmart, Wilde entered into a relationship with Harry Styles, a pop singer 10 years her junior. Granted, I wouldn't describe a global superstar as powerless, but he was the actor and Wilde was the director.
That fact combined with last-minute casting changes, leaked text messages, and a reportedly contentious set, made the film's release challenging for Wilde, even as older--sometimes much older--male directors have been getting busy with younger actresses since the dawn of motion pictures.
You'd figure Wilde would want to put that whole ordeal behind her, and yet I Want Your Sex plays like a super-powered satire about that same sort of dynamic. It's sexy, funny, and over the top in ways that won't be to all tastes, but it might also have been--for Olivia Wilde, at least--cathartic.
Part Two: Erika and Elliot
Araki opens on a scene from out of a very kinky version of Sunset Blvd. There's a naked woman floating facedown in the pool, and inside her modernist home is a young man clad solely in pink nylon lingerie with hair pointing every which way and blood and lipstick smeared all over his face.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," he wails. This is Elliot, a recent and rather aimless UCLA graduate in media arts, and the woman is (or was) Erika Tracy, a ridiculously glamorous artist more famous for her cynical, yet savvy pronouncements about modern art than for her cynical, yet savvy pieces of modern art.
Araki tries to have his cake and eat it, too--and mostly succeeds--because I Want Your Sex satirizes artists who get by more on their looks and their shock tactics than on their artistic talent, except Erika knows her art is bullshit and that her buyers are suckers. She just likes to be in control.
That time appears to have come to an end, so Araki backtracks to the, um, 9½ weeks before she ended up in the pool, and after he returns to the scene of the possible crime, he'll flash forward to trace the aftermath. Instead of causing confusion, the whip-pans back and forth, preceded by oversized on-screen text, add to the humor through their exaggerated portentousness.
Elliot meets Erika when he arrives at her studio to interview for an assistant gig. Compared to the pierced and tattooed young hopefuls gathered in the lobby, he's pretty normcore with his rock band t-shirts (Sonic Youth, Blondie), gas station attendant shirts, sneakers, jeans, and scraggly beard.
Inexplicably, Erika hires him after asking inappropriate questions, like, "Do you have a girlfriend?" He questions her questions, but lets her know that he does indeed have a girlfriend. Minerva (British singer Charli xcx, cast against type), a medical student, spends most nights in bed studying while wearing pajamas, glasses, and a high ponytail. It's not that she isn't attractive, it's that she finds sex--with Elliot, at least--a burden, and Charli mines laughs as the world's most bored and least exciting girlfriend (and her American accent only slips once).
Minerva is all business and no sex, while Erika is a little business and a lot of sex, starting with black, white, and red outfits made from leather, latex, and sheer fabrics that leave little to the imagination (her imperious office manager, played by Daveed Diggs, also rocks some fun fits). To understand how Elliot could be attracted to such a controlling figure, Wilde has to look hotter than hot, and she really does, thanks in part to costume designer Arianne Phillips (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood), who gives Shirley Kurata's eye-popping getups in I Love Boosters a run for the money.
Elliot lives with his less glamorous, more down-to-earth friend, Apple (The Studio's Chase Sui Wonders, virtually unrecognizable from role to role), who is like his conscience in human form. Apple doesn't understand his attraction to Erika's work, though she finds his attraction to Erika easier to understand, especially since she's virtually naked in her video and photographic art.
Elliot also makes a friend of a kind in the narcissistic Zap (Scream's Mason Gooding), a gay studio assistant with a hyperactive sex life who’s nearly as cynical as Erika. He's a non-stop quip machine, and though not all of his zingers land--something I would say about the film as a whole--many do.
Zap warns Elliot that Erika tends to cycle through boy toys pretty rapidly, but he's too obsessed to pay attention. "I think about you all the time," he tells her, and much like Colin in Harry Lighton's BDSM dramedy Pillion, he finds that he likes to be dominated: "With you," he explains, "I don't have to make any decisions." In Pillion, though, Colin's dom, Ray, isn't also his boss. He isn't female either, though Araki has described I Want Your Sex as queer. I suspect he means that in the widest sense of the word, i.e. "differing in some way," according to Merriam-Webster, "from what is usual or normal."
Though his film starts out as a sex comedy, once things go to shit, Araki segues from genre to genre: erotic thriller, melodrama, noir, and horror by way of a procedural-like framing device as Detectives Zem and Zola (Johnny Knoxville and The Doom Generation's Margaret Cho) interrogate Elliot.
In the beginning, though, he's just an eager young employee trying to please a "brilliant" and demanding boss.
Elliot doesn't have a mean bone in his body, but he's not that different from Fred MacMurray's sap in Double Indemnity. His "wildest fantasies," he exclaims, are "coming to life," so he'll put up with anything, except Erika has a make-or-break show coming up, and she relieves her stress by putting Elliot in increasingly humiliating situations involving French artist Yvette (Kaboom's Roxane Mesquida) and the awkward, insecure Apple, who deserves better.
By the end, he's lost everything, but Erika has, too, albeit in different ways. Araki is hardly a moralist, but he was only going to let her get away with her abuse for so long, especially once Elliot learns what she was really up to. Against all odds, the director manages to conjure up a happy ending out of a scenario that began with a naked woman floating facedown in the pool.
Part Three: Gregg, Olivia, and Cooper
For all Araki's fun with genre, I Want Your Sex is a comedy at heart, and it's my favorite of the year next to Boots Riley's Boosters in which another ridiculously glamorous woman (played by Demi Moore) dominates and exploits her younger and more vulnerable employees. I wouldn’t say these men are taking powerful women to task, though, just duplicitous ones.
I've seen Araki’s 12th film twice, a good test for a comedy, because some aren't as funny without the element of surprise, but I found the funny stuff just as funny the second time around and the less-funny stuff--like Zem and Zola--just as less-funny. It's his best comedy since Smiley Face. If anything, the new film is a more substantial piece of work in terms of the concepts at play, like power dynamics and artistic intent, though Anna Faris, who grew up in Edmonds, Wash., gives a stoner-comedy performance for the ages.
Similarly, I Want Your Sex wouldn't work as well without the right actors, and Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman are absolutely up to the task, and bounce off each other with ease. Wilde doesn't just look right for the part, she's eminently convincing as a powerhouse who has it all, but lives each day knowing how quickly she could lose it--something with which Wilde has had at least a little taste--whereas Hoffman is eminently believable as an older version of the young adventurer he played in PT Anderson's semiautobiographical Licorice Pizza, once again under the sway of an older, more experienced woman, and once again: the chemistry is electric.
We know he should run away, but we also understand why he doesn't.
Make it an Araki Summer! I Want Your Sex opens today at Pacific Place and other AMC and Regal theaters. On Aug 11, it plays SIFF Film Center, by way of Grand Illusion Cinema. Then, on Aug 21, Araki's debut, Three Bewildered People in the Night, opens at Northwest Film Forum, followed by the new 4K restoration of his 2004 masterpiece, Mysterious Skin, on Aug 23.
Images from The Playlist (Charli xcx and Cooper Hoffman making like Claude Jade and Jean-Pierre Léaud in Bed and Board), BACKGRID / People (Olivia Wilde and Harry Styles in Italy), American Cinematographer (William Holden as seen by John F. Seitz), Empire (Wilde and Hoffman), Indiewire (Wilde with a wink), and RIOTUS (Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville).
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