New Queer Cinema’s one of the most important figures and someone who has signed many significant works in this field in the past, Gregg Araki is returning after a twelve-year break with I Want Your Sex, advising us that we need to be more open about sex. Frankly, it really surprised me that a director who made films I still greatly admire such as Mysterious Skin (2004) and Totally F**d Up (1993) has come back with something that looks so cheap and leans, in places, on rather vulgar humor.
That said, I can’t claim to have closely followed Araki’s career outside his early films. I already knew that his 2014 film White Bird in a Blizzard wasn’t considered particularly successful. Maybe I should have watched that one first before this film and adjusted my expectations accordingly.
The film begins in a luxury villa. Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) wakes up dazed in pink underwear and finds a naked body in the pool. In a panic he calls the police. While he’s explaining everything during the interrogation, the story jumps back nine and a half weeks. If you’re wondering “why nine and a half weeks?”, it’s quite possible this is a reference to the 1986 erotic film 9½ Weeks.
Unemployed Elliot shares a house with his closest friend Apple. His girlfriend Minerva is constantly studying and has no interest in sex. Elliot starts working as an assistant in the studio of famous artist Erika Tracy, who produces works such as pink plaster penises and vagina collages made of chewing gum. I really liked the way the film mocks the side of today’s contemporary art world that increasingly markets itself through scandal and provocation. There he acquires a coworker named Zap. Unfortunately Zap remains more of a clichéd “funny gay friend” figure than someone who makes any real contribution to the story.
A week later Erika calls him into her room and a sexual relationship begins between them. Before long this relationship turns into a dominant-submissive dynamic with intense BDSM practices. When I say “intense,” I’m not exaggerating at all; the film deliberately chooses to recognize no limits on this front.
Is I Want Your Sex a film with a political concern, or is it merely a provocative erotic comedy that just wants to make things a bit crazier? When I finished the film I can’t say I was able to give a definite answer to that. However, as Araki has frequently stated in his interviews, one of the film’s main starting points is the idea that Generation Z has become increasingly timid and distant when it comes to sexuality. The film encourages young people to be bolder based on this observation.
The problem is that the film almost never questions why this timidity has emerged. There is a huge gap between the world of the 90s in which Araki spent his youth and today. The pandemic, wars, economic crises, the sense of a lack of future, the way social media has transformed relationships, and capitalism’s structure that rapidly consumes everything…
These are the factors shaping Generation Z’s view of sexuality today. The film largely ignores this entire picture and prefers to reduce the issue to a lack of individual courage. Consequently, the solution Araki offers also feels far too superficial to me. Throughout the film, liberation mostly becomes synonymous with the characters having more extreme sexual experiences. Maid costumes, humiliation fantasies or BDSM practices are of course a natural part of the film’s narrative; the issue is not their presence.
The problem is that the film almost completely ignores the alienation and social conditions experienced by the young generation and defines liberation solely through pushing sexual boundaries. Yet liberation is not something that can be established only through the body; there are also economic, social and cultural conditions that determine it.
The interesting side of the matter is that, when we look at Araki’s career, this approach is not entirely a surprise. In his early films there was also a nihilistic, anarchic attitude that didn’t take life too seriously. But those films seemed more compatible with the spirit of their time. I Want Your Sex tries to carry the same attitude into today’s world but fails to adequately grasp today’s reality. As a result, what emerges is a film that is occasionally entertaining, at times succeeds in being funny and provocative, yet fails to convince me with what it has to say about generations.
