Because I’m not a psycho busybody and I got my own problems to deal with, I spend approximately zero percent of my time wondering how frequently, enjoyably, or creatively people decades younger than I am are having sex. But America just isn’t America without some kind of sexual panic, and if the kids ain’t fucking too much they must not be fucking enough. The culprit? Whatever real or imagined cultural trend happens to annoy, perplex, or bedevil you at the moment.
This discursive climate, such as it is, provides the backdrop to a pair of otherwise much different new comedies. Gay New Wave veteran Gregg Araki’s return-to-formish I Want Your Sex taunts our squeamishness, while Will Gluck’s somehow-not-straight-to-Netflix One Night Only backhandedly commends it.
Doing press for I Want Your Sex, the 66-year-old Araki has suggested he’s all in on this “what’s wrong with the kids?” nonsense. And when Olivia Wilde’s carnally rapacious millennial boss tells Cooper Hoffman’s sexually perplexed zoomer about an article she’s read an article about the widespread celibacy of “Gen Z,” and he responds with a slopload of mass-psych that Google AI could have lifted from an Atlantic article, I feared the worst.
Have we become a nation incapable of subtext? I mean, imagine if Anne Bancroft had called Dustin Hoffman a baby boomer and he’d responded with a tirade about why his generation was the way it is. (And it’s not like The Graduate was exactly a subtle movie.) Araki himself used to riff nastily of this kind of Time Magazine sociology rather than, if you’ll pardon the expression, swallowing it whole, like when one virgin in 1995’s The Doom Generation confesses to another why he can’t get it up: “I’m afraid of AIDS.”
But though Araki wrote the script for his first film in 12 years with sex columnist Karley Sciortino, who is about Wilde’s age (and wrote a trend column for Vogue about her own movie; there really are no rules any more), I Want Your Sex isn’t some boomer/millennial tag team against the tragically unfucked kids. Instead, the director is simply up to his old tricks—unleashing an anarchic freak on an unwitting innocent who’s out of his depth and seeing how it all splatters from there.
The chaos agent here is Wilde’s Erika Tracy, a exhibitionist installation artist whose career is poised somewhere between its peak and its collapse. Perched with seductive authority behind her desk, her body unfailingly encased in revealing and/or tight outfits, Erika emits bitchy aphorisms she doesn’t even pretend to mean. Her prey is Hoffman’s Elliot, a would-be podcaster as normie as Erika is extra, who shows up at her office, desperate for work. Madcap S&M antics ensue, Elliot submitting with docile glee until their dynamic is monkeywrenched by his romantic feelings and Erika’s erratic behavior.
I Want Your Sex is Araki at his most cineplex-friendly, partly because there’s much less to subvert in mainstream comedy than there was 30 years ago. Regardless of what the kids are up to in bed, they do know PornHub, and bondage gear just doesn’t shock moviegoers anymore. At a glance, Araki’s flirtation with broad commercial comedy is indistinguishable from ordinary product. Wilde’s character edges a little too much toward Horrible Bosses, and I’ve seen people compare the buttplay here to Deadpool’s (ouch, now that’s the wrong kind of pain).
Perhaps anxious about this, Araki waxes metatextual—the film riffs enough off Sunset Boulevard (it opens with Wilde found floating in a pool) that I half-expected Erika to complain “It’s the dildos that got small.” And the action takes place over the course of “9 1/2 weeks.” Hey, I get it! The film’s dated art world satire exudes a different sort of anxiety. Erika’s current masterwork is a vagina composed of countless intern-chewed wads of gum. Why do hip filmmakers always seem to want to assure suburbanites that they’re arty but not that kind of arty?
The film’s success rests on its stars’ willingness to go to extremes. A glowed-up Hoffman makes good on the promise of Licorice Pizza, where he seemed like a one-off. And Wilde is basking in the comeback of the year, playing the mirror image of the kink-craving, under-fucked wife she plays in the (much funnier/better) The Invite. Though honestly Chase Sui Wonders, as Elliot’s roommate and bestie, is so engaging I almost wish the Erika/Elliot was a subplot in a movie about her, so we could watch continue on her own sexual journey.
The rest of the supporting cast also shines. Mason Gooding (Cuba’s kid) is Zap, another intern, an unrepentant gay man in a world of proliferating identities—when Elliot claims to be “queer adjacent,” Zap asks “Have you ever sucked a dick?” There are nice turns from Charli XCX as Elliot’s sex-avoidant girlfriend, Daveed Diggs as Erika’s snooty aide-de-camp, and the lovely Roxane Mesquida as Erika’s supercilious Euro counterpart. Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville are cops for some reason, grilling Elliot after the body is found, and even former Araki regular James Duval makes a brief appearance.
Like many film tricksters, Araki has always been a bit shifty when it comes to tone, so you should know better than to expect something as wholesome as “sex positivity” from him. If I Want Your Sex has anything close to that horrifying hallmark of bad movies, “a point,” it’s an insistence that sex is and should be messy, dangerous, and life-altering.
Of course, wisdom-through-excess is its own sex orthodoxy. (Sometimes I feel like the only kink we’re still allowed to shame is vanilla sex.) And let’s be honest: Erika would be a bit much in the bedroom for most of an audience that’s snickering at Elliot’s timidity. If Araki really does want kids to fuck more, I’m not sure this is the best route.
I walked out grinning from an all-too-typically undersold Lagoon, hardly the ideal setting for a raucous comedy. And yet as I sat down to write this, I couldn’t recall specifically what had put me in this state of afterglow. There’s not much to hold on to after the fizz of I Want Your Sex is gone, but I guess sex do be like that sometimes, don’t it?
The go-to cliché descriptor for failed comedies like One Night Only is “painfully unfunny,” but I felt no pain watching its stars hustle their cute lil butts up and down the length of Manhattan at remarkable speed (congestion pricing really must work). Instead I felt numb, to the point where if hilarity had somehow (accidentally?) ensued 45 minutes in, I wouldn’t have been able to respond. I was suspended, unreachable, in some liminal space beyond both laughter and dismay.
“The Purge meets-cute with The Lobster” isn’t even a good idea in theory, as anyone who’s already rolled their eyes in disbelief at the trailer of director Will Gluck’s disaster will attest. As you’ve no doubt heard, the misguided concept here is that the U.S. has banned premarital sex except for one night of the year. (Uh… ha ha ha?) Have questions about how that’s enforced? No worries—the movie will answer them with as much heavyhanded deliberation as it prevents its two attractive leads from fucking for 100 minutes.
When the big night rolls around, Owen (Callum Turner) learns that his girlfriend (Maya Hawke) would rather experiment with their hunky neighbor. As he dejectedly searches for a substitute partner, he repeatedly bumps into Allie (Monica Barbero), who stiff-arms him because she’s determined to find true love. Why would she choose Fuck Night (my term, not the movie’s) for such a task? Surely one of the few (if dubious) advantages of this anti-sex regime is that it affords you 364 other days to get to know potential suitors without the pressure of taking it to the bedroom.
I know, you shouldn’t ask questions like that of a romcom. But my brain needed something to occupy it while waiting for either Owen or Allie’s latest potential partner to demonstrate how they were incompatible in some absurd way. At times, One Night Only seems to have been made as court-ordered punishment (blink twice if you’re in danger, Monica). At others—particularly the finale, which pretends to be a meaningful riff off An Affair to Remember—Gluck and co. clearly think they’re on to something clever. The director has even claimed that After Hours and Midnight Run inspired him, the poor dear.
Though attractive and likeable, Turner and Barbero aren’t so much playing actual humans as embodying examples from a screenwriting guidebook. (“Be as specific and concrete as you can when writing characters.”) Owen runs his own pizza shop; Allie sings Katy Perry songs rewritten as psoriasis ads to pay rent but can’t perform live because of stage fright. And now you know everything about them. When it’s not inarticulate, Travis Braun’s script is limp. Sadly, I could probably deliver the line “They’re not all hitters” more credibly than Barbero.
And yet, One Night Only does accurately capture our own cinematic dystopian present. First off, it’s all titillation, dangling two hotties in various states of undress for us to gawk at as they endlessly talk about sex (and not in a fun, French art-film kinda way) instead of just, you know, doing it. Then there’s the excessive stunt casting and indulgence in celebrity in-jokes—if pointing-Leo-memeing at Julia Fox, Ziwe, Este Haim, and (don’t ask) Molly Ringwald and LeVar Burton encased in postcoital bubble wrap (Do. Not. Ask.) is your idea of fun, then tee-fuckin’-hee for you.
And if this is a real “New York movie,” as I knew at least one reviewer would claim, with “the city basically a character,” it’s a character as bland as the rest, the featureless 21st century NYC of a gentrifier’s dream, overrun with brands like KY Jelly, Buck Mason, Dunkin Donuts, Duolingo, and CitiBike. Gluck has insisted that the film got no cash for product placement, and it’s somehow sadder that he couldn’t imagine an unbranded New York than if the script had added an extended fight over the last condom in town to score some Durex bucks.
Watching One Night Only after I Want Your Sex, I can generously discern a hint of a resonant idea buried pea-like beneath this romcom’s puffy stack of mattresses. For decades now, every new crop of twentysomethings has felt the pressure to have THE BEST SEX EVER while they’re young; what could be more dystopian than to have all the frantic bad sex of your youth telescoped into one single night?
But there’s a reason “reactionary” has “reaction” in it. Romantic comedies are inherently small-c conservative, maintaining the social order by pairing off the sexes. But One Night Only is outright prudish, expressing distaste for the couples writhing around Owen and Allie. And that’s not even to mention its most annoying character, a mouthy tween who makes inappropriate remarks. Gluck even claims he cut some nudity because audiences hate skin.
As with an earlier Gluck film, Friends With Benefits, One Night Only feigns horniness as a means to preaching monogamy. It’s not a spoiler to say that Owen and Allie wind up together (you can’t spoil something that’s never been fresh) or that they’re forced to wait another year to consummate their relationship. I wonder if Gluck even realizes that this happy ending is essentially an argument for state-sponsored celibacy.
I Want Your Sex — B+
One Night Only — C-
