I Want Your Sex

This is a Gregg Araki movie, and it feels like forever since this man made one. He's been doing television, but this is his first feature in over a decade. I'm here for the Gen X revival!  👴🏻 😄 If you know Araki, you know roughly what you're getting. His movies have always had this quirky energy. He's sex-positive. He puts sex right there on the table and lets his characters do whatever weird shit they're going to do. This is definitely that. There's all the sex you could want in this movie. It's not exactly vulgar, though some of it is, and honestly I think it's more vulgar linguistically than visually. You still see plenty. This is absolutely not coy about what it is. Cooper Hoffman plays Elliot, a young guy in his early twenties who goes to work as an assistant for Erika Tracy, played by Olivia Wilde. She's a famous artist and provocateur, she's older, she's successful, and she's his boss. She decides she wants a dom/sub relationship with him. She's the dom. He's the sub. And he's down for it. He does what she asks him to do. She brings him into her sexual games, and it spills over into his relationship with his girlfriend, his roommate, his work and the rest of his life. He gets into increasingly ridiculous situations because of it, and the movie keeps playing with the question of what these two people are actually doing to each other. Is she using him? Is he using her? Is this a relationship? Is it just sex? Where can this thing possibly go? I found that interesting from beginning to end. I was never bored. Both of these people seem broken to some extent, although Elliot considerably less so. He mostly seems like a young guy screwing around and screwing some people over while he figures himself out. That's what people in their early twenties do. However you cut it. Erika is where I have the problem. Not because she likes sex. Not because she's kinky. Not because she's roughly twice his age. I don't care about any of that. She is his BOSS. That changes the whole thing for me, and the movie sort of wants you to forgive it for the sake of the film. Now, I'm also not going to pretend Elliot is a helpless victim. He isn't. He wants to participate. He enjoys a lot of what they're doing. He's a strong enough presence to say no when he really means no, and when he really means it, he does. At no point was I sitting there thinking somebody needed to call the cops and rescue poor Cooper Hoffman from Olivia Wilde. He could have gotten himself out of this. He's a willing participant in these games. But she is still his boss. If Erika were a man, this is a Harvey Weinstein situation and everybody would know it immediately. You don't even have to flip the genders all the way. Make it an older man doing this to a younger man. Still awkward. Still problematic. Araki actually wrote it the other way around first, with a male dom and a female sub, and then swapped them. Which tells me he knows exactly what he's doing here, and it makes me more curious about why some people watching this seem to sail right past the power dynamic. I don't get it. The whole thing is problematic. In real life, this is a walking, talking, breathing lawsuit. People in my industry make a lot of money when things like this happen. And things like this actually happen, particularly with the genders in reverse. So I can't completely ride with the movie to the extent it wants me to treat all of this as fine. I'm willing to play along. I'm willing to watch broken people make bad decisions. I'm willing to watch problematic shit in a movie. I don't need my characters to be good people, and I don't need a filmmaker standing over my shoulder telling me what to think about them. Araki doesn't judge these people and he dint want you to either. He puts them out there, lets them be weird and damaged and selfish, and lets you react to what you're seeing. I'm fine with that. I just don't want to pretend the power imbalance isn't problematic the whole time because Olivia Wilde is charismatic and Cooper Hoffman is enjoying himself. All that aside, Wilde understands exactly what movie she's in. Erika has to be charismatic and magnetic enough that Elliot keeps making worse decisions for her, and Wilde sells it. Hoffman works too, because he never plays Elliot as somebody being dragged around. He's making choices. Bad ones, but they're his. That's part of why the movie held me. I never quite settled on what to make of these two, and I don't think it wants me to. I liked this. I thought it was good. And for whatever it's worth, this is better than One Night Only. If you're choosing between the two, see this one first. There's also the small matter that this movie actually has sex in it and One Night Only mostly doesn't. But that part is only for this review. Don't tell anybody going to see ONO. Let them believe what they want to believe going in. 😄