I WANT YOUR SEX. The milieu of contemporary “fine” art, pinioned as it is to its own ironic self-importance, has always been ripe for satire, with cinema as appropriate a vehicle for it as any. Going back to the olden days of the mid-20th century, when movies were splintering into factions and movements, the outsider arms were as much a part of the art movement as they were critical of it. Uniquely able to both vivify and critique the expansive silliness of post-modernism, with the moving image making the audience accomplice andobserver of the diaphanous moment when inspiration becomes commerce, film defines and defies the contradiction inherent in the transactional.
To me, the medium is best served when it employs comedy in its dissection, playfully using capital-A Artas its palette and its bullseye, thereby illuminating the inescapable conflict: Art is vitally important, but to treat it as such cannot but render it silly and crass.
Enter Greg Araki and I Want Your Sex, in a near-perfect union of the absurd and the authentic. Araki, who became, over 30 years ago, something of a torch-bearer for independent American queer cinema with The Living End (1992), Totally Fucked Up (1993) and The Doom Generation (1995) in astonishingly quick succession, has been absent from scripted features for more than a decade (he’s been busy in television, so presumably he’s doing all right), but the energy and vibrance of his latest belie that period of absence. Equal parts scathing caricature and loving mediation, I Want Your Sex uses the impossibly self-aggrandizing setting of the contemporary Los Angeles art scene as backdrop and analog for an examination of modern erotic mores and hang-ups, to exceedingly comedic, trenchant effect.
Eliot Bell (Cooper Hoffman), fresh out of UCLA with a clearly useless BFA and no prospects, shares an apartment with his best friend Apple (Chase Sui Wonders) —where he consistently fails to pay rent — and a relationship with the obviously disinterested Minerva (Charli XCX). On something of a whim, he applies for a job as an assistant in the studio of acclaimed artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), a self-styled provocateur whose latest work requires her staff to assemble a vulva from freshly chewed bubble gum and paint papier-mache penises dayglow colors. Formally and otherwise, Erika’s output isn’t saying much, but she (and what she represents) speaks to Eliot, literally and figuratively, and she uses his obvious reverence to retool him as her temporary sex toy.
Deconstructing his Zillenial fear-worship (apologies to James Agee) of real physical intimacy, Erika draws Eliot into an imbalanced, if liberating, BDSM relationship that destroys most of his other relationships and threatens his actual freedom.
Which makes this sound much more dire than it actually is. Araki, while a student of the sickness and depravity just beneath the surface of much of human experience, has a grand and gleeful sense of humor that colors the tone, aesthetic and context of I Want Your Sex as much as in any of his work. In Hoffman and Wilde — who, just this year, seems to have become one of greatest screen comedians — he has found ideal accomplices for his subversive but accessible takedown of repression and bogus subversiveness. Both playing with archetypes — Wilde using her natural beauty as a tool for self-parody, Hoffman his naivete and unassuming appearance as distractions from his inner light — the two propel a zany, ironic send-up of some of our fundamental public and personal self-contradictions that is as topical and insightful as it is irreverent. R. 90M. PRIME.
HER PRIVATE HELL. Even casual fans of Nicholas Winding Refn know what we’re getting into: a fantasia of hideous violence visited by and upon statuesque people, within a gorgeously constructed, luridly lit netherworld. You buy the ticket, you take the ride; the unprepared will likely lose interest or become actively repelled in the very early going. As Elle (Sophie Thatcher), our maybe-protagonist, intones, “It won’t work. This movie won’t fix us.”
She isn’t speaking directly to us, of course, or even about the movie itself, rather the movie within the movie. But there’s the rub. Refn, though a consummate artist and student of the form, is constantly messing with our expectations, pulling the rug with his dichotomous combination of formal beauty, visceral grotesquerie and, to be fair, impiety to narrative as the engine of cinema.
Like The Neon Demon (2016), Refn’s most recent feature, Her Private Hell takes place in a not-quite-real world. Here, it’s a mist-shrouded maybe-Tokyo, where Elle has arrived to meet her father, Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott) and act in a strangely stagey comic book adaptation. Of course, that scenario is the merest of suggestions as to what’s actually afoot, which is a killer (called the Leatherman) with diamond-studded murder-gloves stalking the streets, pursued by U.S. Army Private K (Charles Melton). Also there’s a lot of psycho-sexual melodrama involving Elle’s costar Hunter (Kristine Froseth), stepmother Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), a hatchet and an astonishing amount of very dramatic lighting.
Less avid viewers will, in fairness, denigrate the plot here as incidental. But for those who signed up for the creeping dread, formal perfection and discomfiting atmosphere we’ve come to expect, we very much get what we paid for. R. 110M. PRIME.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
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This article appears in Local Lit.