While Sundance is traditionally focused on the importance of looking to the future of American film, a lineup filled with more first-timers than any other major festival, this year has been all about looking back. There are misty eyes over the loss of founder Robert Redford along with host state Utah and also for the many films that have premiered here over the years. Alongside more retrospective screenings than one usually expects, even the new films have a touch of old Sundance to them.
On opening day, Rachel Lambert’s small town drama Carousel conjured up memories of quiet character driven indies of the late 90s and early 00s and then, on a Friday full of packed out premieres, I Want Your Sex took us back to the era’s more in-your-face acts of provocation, made by renegade outsiders who would have otherwise struggled to find a place in the industry. It’s the new film from Gregg Araki, a film-maker who was at the forefront of this particular wave, one of Sundance’s most loved enfants terribles. He’s premiered most of his films here, from “heterosexual movie” The Doom Generation to magnum opus Mysterious Skin to all-time stoner comedy Smiley Face to 2014’s misbegotten drama White Bird in a Blizzard, his last film until now.
Introducing his much-anticipated return to the audience, and briefly detailing the decade it’s taken to make it, Araki was as excitable as one would hope the director of a film called I Want Your Sex to be, a film dubbed a “return to form” by the pre-introduction introduction. It’s certainly a return to what many know him for – vibrant colours, unfettered sex, madcap plotting – but it’s also missing that same sense of infectiously boisterous energy. The parts are here but there’s nothing to truly animate them, just the vague hope that maybe nostalgia might be enough.
For a while it almost is. Araki hasn’t taken us to this fun, kitschy territory since 2010’s scrappy college cult caper Kaboom, and as we watch Cooper Hoffman and a mincing Mason Gooding help create a vagina made of chewed up gum, it’s hard not to feel excited for what someone like Araki might have to say about this current moment. Before we realise that the answer is “not that much”, our hopes are lifted by the electric presence of Olivia Wilde, an often misused or misunderstood actor whom Araki has compared to an “old-time star” like Ingrid Bergman or Greta Garbo. While it might be hard to imagine either woman lubing a dildo to place up her assistant’s ass, there is a magnetically old school femme fatale pull to how she plays provocative artist Erika Tracy, every eye immediately drawn to her whenever she enters a room.
One of her many admirers is new assistant Elliot (Hoffman), a sexually inexperienced rube she can easily sniff out and one she quickly takes under her wing, a student to be taught. He becomes her sub, a toy to be blindfolded, pegged and spanked whenever she pleases, a thrilling new world for him, stuck with a bored, sexless girlfriend (Charli xcx, a little flat). Araki, who wisely gender-swapped the pair after #MeToo, uses their different ages and sexual histories to comment on an ongoing tussle based on widely believed stereotypes about horny millennials and prudish gen Z-ers, laid out quite obviously in an early discussion between the pair (Erika bemoans the “retro sex negativity” of Elliott’s generation). Erika is also exhausted by political correctness, rolling her eyes at the “woke police” and gets a kick out of degrading a younger man to remind him of his base impulses.
But even though Araki delivers his didactic thesis upfront, he doesn’t really have much more to add or really expand upon. The sexual relationship between the pair is surprisingly tame even if they both bare almost everything, played-for-laughs scenes involving dildos, handcuffs and ball gags doing very little to raise an eyebrow (maybe Araki is once again poking fun at a straight idea of perversion). It goes from kinky to conventional too soon and while Wilde is more than game and acutely aware of exactly the right tone for an Araki romp (Gooding, playing gay and slutty ever so believably, is also on the same page), Hoffman is seriously miscast, acting as if he were in a different, far less heightened movie (it plays more like he’s auditioning for a Woody Allen comedy). The pair have no form of chemistry, sexual or comedic, and while we might see them in many, many semi-naked situations, it remains hard to actually believe that any sex is being had and that anyone is getting any enjoyment out of it.
It’s a film that’s ultimately more suggestively cheeky than actually raunchy and while Araki choosing to position sex as harmless and silly at a time when it might be demonised by some is certainly admirable, shouldn’t we be having a little bit more fun with it? It’s a 90-minute romp that feels longer than that, increasingly unexciting hijinks (a threesome that fizzles, a murder plot that flames out, more dildos) that are never as amusing or as propulsive as they should be. I Want Your Sex wants our shock, our arousal and our debate but it barely gets our attention.
I Want Your Sex is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
