Critic-at-Large: Dance-Floor Romance, I Want Your Sex

Dance-Floor Romance

Chris Tse’s laureate collection is a sweet-talking triumph 

Chris Tse was Aotearoa New Zealand’s Poet Laureate from 2022 to 2025, and did the job so well that the National Library literally extended the term of its laureates by a year as a result. Dance-Floor Romance comes in the wake of this achievement, and in some ways is that achievement, distilled on the page: it’s Tse’s laureate collection, arranged into four years, one for each of his term. Romance is the leading notion, which is roughed up by the dance-floor—the real, messy world—as it overlays sexual, aesthetic, and economic drives: “Was it surrender or ecstasy? You tell me.” (“BRAT by Charli XCX...”)

A number of great dance albums indeed dot the collection—brat, Erotica, Nightlife, Blackout, Fever—and standing alongside them is the work of great visual artists—Robert Mapplethorpe, Lubaina Himid, Marsden Hartley, Louise Bourgeois, and more. This ekphrastic tendency suits Tse well, as he’s always been, for me, a poet of nouns—of things—who can make parts of the world collide like a child playing with toys: “Time writes the song / in which the club is a landscape / I worship” (“Nightlife by Pet Shop Boys...”). Yet, as the poetry sings together disparate things, there’s continual reference to the world “back then” (“art versus the world”), a “time” when the poet “didn’t know what to do / with love” (“Your uncle’s story”). It’s an effective rhetorical stance for the more personal disclosures of the collection, and the wisened-up vantage point from which it looks back on such memories—but it also comes to head in a lovely poem commemorating forty years of homosexuality’s decriminalisation in Aotearoa, “Happy; Happy.” That poem opens in a signature Tse burst of po-faced humor and sweet-talking sincerity—“I plead guilty to happiness by living against the law”—and (along with the earlier prose sequences “Speak its name” and “Long exposure”) turns the historicising tendency up a notch, as the poet surveys not just personal but social history. Implicitly, the latter refigures and redeems the former: the nightlife is not just a place of personal hedonism, lost in one’s own high. Rather, nightlife has been so important to queer resistance because it’s a space where we can act as though we were already free.  

The final suite of poems is the most outstanding, the most forthright and moving, of Tse’s career thus far. It’s struck through with remembrances of his travels around the globe—ones afforded to the poet by his laureateship—but punctures them with a glancing back home, to “the landscapes that held my absence” (“Lines composed less than a mile...”). Tse’s previous collection, Super-Model Minority, dealt with civic concerns—dispelling colonial concepts of nation-building; racism; queer resistance; utopia; sex; joy as a political action—but the new thrill that emerges here toward the end of Dance-Floor Romance is a restatement of the lyric within the civic. These are some of Tse’s more overtly autobiographical poems, full of the wilding enjambments that characterise his best verse, and yet their gaze turns outward—not inward—to us. In the extended monologue “Number 13” (Tse was our thirteenth laureate), the poet seeks both political vision and “easy life too—hands free to caress the world in its velvets, / not to obsess or fret about the sharp edges that catch my / wild tongue. A pattern must be broken. A heavy heart needs / emptying to make room for courage. So I listen to Robyn’s.” That heavy swing between the personal and the public, roused doubly into poetry and into popular song, is one of the big bids for complexity Tse makes convincing in this collection. Here is our poet, staring down the barrel of contemporary unrest unflinchingly, re-centring sensuality at the heart of public life, and re-centring poetry at the heart of public speech: “These days I wish for love more than ever, / now that I’m attuned to its give & take” (“The last poem”).

I Want Your Sex

Gregg Araki’s new film barely coheres

Mentions of sexual violence follows. 

Oh, deary me. The latest offering from Gregg Araki would bill itself as a black comedy—if only it weren’t so egregiously overlit! Araki’s visual style here is part SNL sketch and part YouTube Short; everything is stilted, the mise-en-scene looks ludicrously cheap, the cinematography leaves no pore unexfoliated, and our director struggles to block his scenes in any way other than a banal sequence of straight-to-Netflix shot-reverse-shot yawns. To accompany the release of this film, Araki has given an interview in the New Yorker in which he bemoans Gen Z’s supposed lack of sex life. But the film he made depicts exclusively sex scenes that crudely tow a blurry line between seduction and coercion. So much for an antidote! Of course, Araki knows something my generation risks forgetting: that people must retain their right to describe their own experiences. Rather than blanketing the events of his story with the diagnosis of “sexual assault,” Araki refuses to take a moralising stance on the film’s action in a way that is both deeply unsettling and deeply admirable—and, for me, the film’s most unexpectedly touching note is struck in those moments when its protagonist, Elliot (Cooper Hoffmann), comes to realise, only months later and in a police station, the power imbalances exploited by his boss, Erika (Olivia Wilde), when she pursued a sexual relationship with him (the majority of the film is framed as his recollections). 

I Want Your Sex tells Elliot’s story, the story of a jobless art school graduate, as he works for and very quickly is seduced by the pop-art multi-media artist Erika Tracy, who employs him as an assistant. But, for a film full of kinky sex scenes, it contains between its two leads no nudity, no sensuality, no concept of the erotic. It takes a straight-talking French character, Yvette—who has all of one scene!—to skewer the film’s project when she intones in complete seriousness her idea of sexuality as a “dance between two people.” The Americans quickly make fun of her, but you get the nagging sense that this morality drama snarkily phrased as between two generations (with the repressed Gen Z Elliot on the one hand and the libertine Gen X Erika on the other) might better have been phrased as a drama between two conceptions of sexuality.

Araki came to prominence as part of the Queer New Wave, largely a critical term that describes the rise of filmmakers, particularly in the US, whose films centred queer experiences through the early 90s. Riding this wave, he’s dealt with far more difficult subject matter in a far more subtle manner before, as in his 2004 masterpiece Mysterious Skin, which remembers a grooming and rape of a child from the perspective of it’s now-teenaged victim in very powerful visual language, well-rendered and imaginative but never sensational. And so part of the disappointment at this latest offering has to do with how poorly it stacks up against his legendary filmography. I’m not opposed to a critique of Gen Z prudishness—in fact, I encourage it. My issue with this film is not that it’s morally “irresponsible” but that it’s imprecise and formally sloppy: the comedy is often oddly-paced; the acting dry, slow, and under-rehearsed. Its jumbled script (not to mention its flinch-out triple ending—see it for yourself) offers less a dissection of our sexual culture and more a mutilation; a mess. Sure, I’ll grant that I Want Your Sex is a funny and riotous watch—and in Araki’s bawdy, cock-swinging filmography, the comedown has always been worth the high. Until now.