movie review
I WANT YOUR SEX
Running time: 90 minutes. Not yet rated.
PARK CITY, Utah — Sundance’s annual carnival of carnality comes this year in the form of “I Want Your Sex,” director Gregg Araki’s explicit new comedy starring Olivia Wilde that premiered Friday.
It’s got something for everybody — toplessness, threesomes, dildos, ball gags, S&M and, of course, art-world satire.
Wilde plays a once-successful and swaggering artist named Erika Tracy whose primary interest is on what goes down in the bedroom.
For example, she makes her assistants stick their chewed bubblegum on a line-drawing of a woman’s nether regions.
Indeed, another title for this movie could be “HR?”
Although, unlike another steamy boss-employee daliance film, “Babygirl” with Nicole Kidman, Araki’s style and scenery are fanciful, almost like being in a neon dollhouse. Reality isn’t the point.
In the opening seconds of his movie, Erika is lying face down in a swimming pool — “Sunset Boulevard”-style — while a young man named Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), wearing pink lingerie, screams bloody murder.
Nine and half weeks earlier, Gen. Z’er Elliot is obsessed with Erika. One night in bed he’s watching one of her videos next to his girlfriend.
“What’s the difference between this and porn?,” asks the buzzkill (Charli xcx).
“Lighting, context,” he says practically drooling.
Araki, who’s very funny, seems to be talking tongue-in-cheek about his own flesh-filled movie there.
Twenty-three-year-old Elliot applies for a job with Erika, and within a week she offers him something much more enticing than being her subordinate. The dominant boss, almost 15 years his senior, wants him to be her submissive.
“HR?!”
The sexy movie, which plateaus about two thirds of the way through and ends poorly, sees their exploits escalate in extremity. Let’s just say Elliott is faced with objects far beyond the confines of his naive imagination.
Erika’s most ardent belief is that Gen. Z are a bunch of prudes who destructively throw away the best years of their lives to stare at their phones.
When she’s right she’s right. And Elliott fast becomes her most devoted disciple.
The 22-year-old Hoffman’s infectious enthusiasm and innocent attitude as Wilde’s Erika ups the ante is what gives the film its charm.
However, this is not a romance like “50 Shades of Gray.” The feelings in “I Want Your Sex” are one-sided. Erika wants his sex; Elliot wants her sex and emotional affection.
That miscommunication plus hormones plus booze leads to disaster for everybody, including his best friend Apple (Chase Sui Wonders), who’s been living vicariously through Elliot’s sexual liberation.
Wilde’s Erika, who’s all business, even during pleasure, is as if Elizabeth Banks’ commentator character from “Pitch Perfect” pivoted to painting. Ridiculous and proud of it. And she clicks with Hoffman, but he could find chemistry with a spatula.
“I Want Your Sex” marks his biggest role since 2021’s “Licorice Pizza,” which was one of the best acting debuts of the decade. Elliot plays to his strengths, which is being simultaneously powerful and puppy dog.
This movie won’t be seen by as many people. It’s too peculiar and uninhibited for most audiences. If you couldn’t handle “Babygirl,” this will make you hurl your TV out the window.
But this is the size and type of role Hoffman should regularly be playing — minus the ball gag and pink bra.
