‘I Want Your Sex’ is an outrageously camp provocation from a director with a long history of queer filmmaking, and for much of its running time it seems determined to discover just how far it can push the boundaries of sex, taste and, particularly, acceptable workplace etiquette.

At its centre is a young man who finds himself working for a successful conceptual artist whose understanding of the employer-employee relationship is unconventional, to put it mildly. She dresses in leather, surrounds herself with sexually provocative imagery – including a painted vagina prominently displayed on the wall – and makes virtually no attempt to conceal her attraction to her new employee.

This is a world of doms and subs where the boundaries between workplace and bedroom seem almost nonexistent.

That makes the film deliberately outrageous, but underneath all the camp excess there is actually a serious question. If somebody desperately needs a job, how freely can they consent to a sexual relationship with the person who employs them?

Our hero is particularly vulnerable because he is stuck in virtually every aspect of his life. Professionally, he doesn’t seem to know what direction he is going in, while his relationship with his girlfriend is hardly providing much emotional stability. She is studying medicine and is intensely focused on her work, leaving him increasingly susceptible to the attention of somebody who appears to find him irresistible.

His employer recognizes his naivety and plays upon it.

What initially looks like seduction therefore becomes considerably more complicated. She isn’t simply an older, confident woman pursuing a younger man. She is his boss. She controls his employment, understands the world into which he has wandered far better than he does and seems to enjoy manipulating that imbalance.

The film knows how outrageous this is and largely revels in it.

Indeed, ‘I Want Your Sex’ sometimes feels like a John Waters movie. There is kitsch everywhere, plenty of deliberate bad taste and an atmosphere in which almost every convention of respectable middle-class behaviour exists principally so that somebody can violate it.

Even the workplace itself seems to have been designed as an extension of its owner’s sexuality. Art, business, performance and desire merge until it becomes almost impossible to tell where one ends and another begins.

Our hero is similarly displaced outside work. When he has to leave his apartment, he ends up staying with a colleague, further eroding any distinction between his professional and personal worlds. Everybody seems to be hooking up with everybody else, and sexual relationships appear to be occurring with such frequency that monogamy starts to look like the most radical lifestyle choice available.

It is frequently very funny.

But there is also something slightly sinister underneath the joke.

The employer’s behaviour would be regarded as wildly inappropriate in almost any conventional workplace, and the gender dynamics make the film particularly interesting. Had we been watching an older male employer behaving this way towards a naïve young female employee, the abuse of power would probably be immediately obvious.

By reversing that familiar configuration, the film invites us to notice how easily exploitation can be disguised as liberation.

Just because somebody is sexually confident doesn’t necessarily mean that the situation is equal.

And that leads into the film’s more serious interest in love and sexual addiction. Is constant sexual activity necessarily liberating, or can it become another means of avoiding emotional intimacy? The characters frequently seem able to negotiate complicated sexual arrangements far more easily than they can communicate what they actually need from one another.

The film’s title itself is revealing. After all, ‘I Want Your Sex’ isn’t the same statement as ‘I want you.’

Desire can be immediate, uncomplicated and physical. Love requires something considerably more difficult.

That distinction becomes particularly important for a protagonist who begins the film drifting between relationships, employment and accommodation. He is looking for somewhere to belong while repeatedly finding himself in situations where other people seem to know exactly what they want from him.

There is potentially a fascinating coming-of-age story underneath all this camp excess: a young man learning the difference between being desired and being valued.

The conceptual-art setting also suits the film because ‘I Want Your Sex’ effectively behaves like a piece of provocative conceptual art itself. It throws sexual imagery, power games, leather, whips and bad taste at the audience and waits to see how we react. Some viewers will undoubtedly find the whole thing hilarious; others may find it exhausting. This is certainly not going to be everyone’s cup of tea.

But that seems partly the point.

The problem is that, having spent so much time advertising its transgressive credentials, the film ultimately loses its nerve.

The ending feels like a complete cop-out, almost as though the studio were worried about how mainstream audiences would react and insisted upon something considerably safer. And that retrospectively changes the film.

For much of its running time, ‘I Want Your Sex’ appears to be challenging conventional ideas about relationships, sexuality, employment and respectability. Yet when it reaches the point where it might actually have to follow those ideas through to their uncomfortable conclusions, it retreats.

The film isn’t ultimately as transgressive as it initially pretends to be.

Perhaps that is its biggest disappointment, because there are genuinely interesting questions buried underneath all the kitsch. How much humiliation or compromise should somebody tolerate simply because they need employment? When does seduction become exploitation? Can somebody consent freely when there is a significant imbalance of power? And does endless sexual freedom necessarily make anybody emotionally freer?

Those are considerably more interesting questions than the film’s deliberately outrageous surface might suggest.

At its best, ‘I Want Your Sex’ is funny, provocative and knowingly tasteless, a queer sexual farce with something of John Waters’ delight in puncturing respectability. At other times, it feels as though the provocation itself is doing most of the work.

And perhaps that is the irony.

For a film so determined to announce that absolutely nothing is off limits, ‘I Want Your Sex’ eventually reveals that it has boundaries of its own.