What feels like an early '70s sex comedy produced by High Hefner but dragged ragged into the twenty-first century could easily look like a cake (with too much icing) of workplace assault and exploitation to the Eliots in the audience but that's the point. Director Greg Araki, like, me has no skin in this inter-generational gundown. He's an X (I'm a Jones) which is also part of the fun. And fun there is with Millennial Erika morphing from Ice Empress to sourmouthed dominatrix in her journey of terraforming Eliot's low social-skilled Zed boy who is by necessity as comfortable admitting his masturbation while in a relationship as he is pretending that the relationsihp itself has any substance.
If you cannot see beyond the depiction of an abusive power game and that your recognition of that aspect is essential to your seeing the comedy, then this film is not for you. Araki doesn't shy from the darker side of the situation by trowelling on the wit: Eliot is fully aware of the unethical imbalance and calls the abuse what it is; he just likes the perks of it when they do come. Would this work if the genders were reversed? This is tested, in a way, by the threesome scene towards the end of the second act in which roles and points of atraction are so dizzily confused that it threatens a few disintegrations. You are, in other words, invited to speculate about gender roles while within this specific reversal. This is so well served by the pace and performances that you can enjoy the counterpoint of thinking what-ifs along with following some fast paced storytelling.
Performances? Olivia Wilde's always-on screen is dizzying in its caprices, declaring a loud paradox one minute and then crumpling it into the bin as nonsense the next. Her energy constrasts with Cooper Hoffman's listless timidity that masks fists of frustration. Araki is clever enough to mete this out so that it doesn't just lead to a climactic explosion in the finale. He has a more complex plan in mind which you'll get to.
Araki fills his screen with thick neon swatches and neo-pop art cheek. Interventions of other genres trade screen time with sudden breakouts of animation which look like the kind of thing that is leading YouTubers to cinema auteurism. Araki doesn't have to do any of this but in this more conventional narrative style that he must adopt to bring off this central conceit, it also feels like a little nod to the auteurs of his own generation, Natural Born Killers-era Oliver Stone or Wes Anderson: it doesn't feel like he's claiming the interventions for himself.
The satire Velvet Buzzsaw from a few years back did something similar using the contemporary art world and, while it had some genuinely funny ironic scenes, never quite outran its own quest for cleverness. I Want Your Sex does work because the cleverness is split between the affectations of the characters and the overall wit of the tale: it's made funny to be funny, all else is collateral. That means that the willing audience shall be the winner.
PS - if you're reviewing this for anything online and need a picture, DO NOT search for the title, even if you add every qualifier from cast crew, date, production company etc. I finally found the image I used by removing the title.
