On the filmic ingredient list for Gregg Araki’s latest film, I Want Your Sex, are the complexities of sex, love and contemporary artistic avenues. It all adds up to an alternately titillating and creepifying dark comedy (titillation and creepifying actually being thematic intentions in the piece). But it’s not necessarily of the “funny haha” comedic brand. Call it an anti-romcom, or a comedy of bad manners, in the bedroom and in the gallery. If you’re in the right mood, you want to like I Want Sex, even when the going gets tough.
But then, Araki is not a man after the mainstream cinema carrot. There is a local angle here, in that Araki studied at UCSB before heading south to the outskirts of Hollywood and earning attention for his spicy 1992 indie film The Living End, acclaimed as an influential chronicle of gay life and an important entry in the New Queer Cinema Movement.
Olivia Wilde, currently also on screens as director/co-star of The Invite and ever the gamey actress, lives up to her name in the role of Erika Tracey, who has made her way with art steeped in erotic audacity. The work-in-progress is an epic image of a vagina caked with well-chewed wads of bubble gum, which an observer at her opening describes as being “like Pornhub meets the bottom of our son’s sneaker.”
Seamlessly blending art and life, she has her way — and then some — with her young assistant Elliott (played by Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman and who made his first big splash in Licorice Pizza). Mostly uncomplainingly, Elliott is her boy toy, sexual flavor of the month, and, in a third act flip, unwitting human art subject.
Satirical excesses abound as the film pokes at the potentially outlandish pretenses of certain contemporary art circles, akin to such films as Ruben Östlund’s toothy The Square and Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty. Our anti-heroine Tracey cagily plays both sides of the fence. At one point, she says that “art cuts through the bullshit of every single day. It connects us to the core emotions that actually make us human — ecstasy, fear, desire. Artists see things other people don’t.” Elsewhere, she cuts through the idealistic palaver: “Contemporary art is a scam, you know that, right? The real art is convincing people you’re making something meaningful and complex when it’s actually just arbitrary masturbation.”
Structurally, Araki tells the sordid story in a cheeky, neo-noir fashion, framing its telling in such familiar turf as a police investigation and a mysterious naked body in a swimming pool. But how much, in the film and in its narrative inner workings, is a parlor trick lined in carnality and winking humor? There’s the rub.
All in all, I Want Your Sex qualifies as a modest, not-so-clean transgressive fun for a summer evening. View trailer here. Currently playing at the SBIFF Film Center.
