Araki's 'I Want Your Sex' puts the art studio's power games on screen

Gregg Araki's latest film, I Want Your Sex, arrived in US cinemas on 31 July with a premise that doubles as a labour dispute: a young studio assistant, played by Cooper Hoffman, is recruited by his employer, a multidisciplinary artist played by Olivia Wilde, into a sexual relationship framed as creative collaboration. The film opens with a flash-forward to the artist floating face-down in her pool, a deliberate echo of Sunset Boulevard, before rewinding to chart how mentorship curdles into control.

Wilde's character, Erika Tracy, runs what the script calls a "hipster sweatshop," where assistants affix chewing gum to a canvas outline of female genitalia one masticated wad at a time. The studio hierarchy is absolute. When Erika summons Elliot to her office, the first question is whether he signed the non-disclosure agreement. The second is an invitation into a BDSM arrangement that escalates in demands for trust and vulnerability.

The film's timing lands amid broader European conversations about power in creative industries, from gallery assistants' working conditions to the #MeToo reckoning in theatre and film. Araki stages the interrogation literally: Elliot recounts events in a police room, where two officers, played by Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville, pick apart the sexual relationship with the procedural discomfort of an HR review.

A satire aimed at the market

Erika dismisses the buzz-driven art market as a "scam," a line the film delivers with a glib shrug rather than sustained analysis. Still, the production design takes the joke seriously. David LaChapelle's studio contributed pieces for the fictional works, including brightly coloured sculptures shaped like sex toys and a Claes Oldenburg-scale fibreglass ball gag. The art is absurd but crafted, positioned as satire with genuine aesthetic ambition rather than the contemptuous send-up Hollywood often defaults to.

Araki, a leading figure of the New Queer Cinema that emerged from the Aids crisis, has long treated pleasure as politically consequential. His 1990s peers, including Todd Haynes and Marlon Riggs, were attacked by right-wing politicians as recipients of degenerate public subsidies. Andres Serrano's Piss Christ became a culture-war weapon. Those fights over state funding for transgressive art have direct parallels in ongoing European debates about public arts budgets and the limits of institutional support.

Generational friction

The film also stages a generational argument. Erika tells Elliot she "read an article" about his generation's prudery and pushes him to abandon inhibitions he cannot yet name. Araki, now an elder of queer cinema, appears to be ventriloquising his own anxiety that hard-won freedoms are being surrendered to caution. Yet the script concedes the self-interest in this urging: Erika's sex-positivity is framed as its own addiction, inseparable from her need for adoration. She becomes visibly aroused when Elliot drafts a fawning press release.

The climax forces both characters to confront the blurry line between mentorship and exploitation during a disastrous gallery opening. Charli xcx appears as Elliot's incompatible girlfriend, a peripheral figure who underscores his isolation before the relationship consumes him.

Whether the film fully resolves its own ambivalence about the world it depicts is debatable. But its central question, who profits when intimacy is rebranded as professional development, extends well beyond the cinema.