Arguably the most transgressive scene in Babygirl, A24’s erotic drama from the Dutch writer and director Halina Reijn that has Nicole Kidman on the awards circuit, is the first one. The film opens with an orgasm – for both Romy Mathis (Kidman) and her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), together, in the marital bed. But as Jacob slumbers in post-coital bliss, Romy scampers down the hall – the shot of Kidman’s bare, apple-cheeked behind recalls her first scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut, one of several erotic 90s touchstones Reijn seeks to invoke and invert through the female gaze. In another room, we witness a private ritual. Her hands desperately flutter across a laptop keyboard; she prostrates herself on the ground, and makes herself come – for real this time – to porn.
It’s a bold opening salvo for a film, a statement of sorts: this film, arriving amid Hollywood’s long slide toward sexlessness, is not about sex so much as female desire. In less than two minutes, we glimpse a tangle of lust, shame, inner chaos, deception, actualization – what Romy sounds like when she’s faking it and when she’s not. For her, as for many women, desire is a maze, bent by societal pressures and warped by internalized incuriosity, non-linear, combustible and not fully comprehensible.
She is, in other words, all potential energy, ignited by Samuel, a deus ex machina in the form of an intern. Romy, the 50-something CEO of a vaguely outlined robotics company, first eyes Samuel, played with slouchy insouciance by the 28-year-old actor Harris Dickinson, stonily commanding a rogue dog; he somehow recognizes that what Romy secretly, fervently desires is a firm hand to nuzzle herself. It’s not a spoiler to say that the two summarily embark on a seemingly torrid, though coolly relayed, affair with a light dom/sub dynamic during the longest and horniest Christmas season on record, imperiling Romy’s frigid stability and her personal and professional lives.
Babygirl purports to be, in marketing and in premise, an exploration of power dynamics – Romy as the boss and older woman who craves an inversion of her persona in private, Samuel the underling who takes charge – and the propulsive, mystifying, possibly annihilating power of lust. In practice, it’s a muddled affair, as confused on what it’s seeking as Romy is herself. At times, the film flirts with a traumatic explanation for Romy’s sub proclivities, suggesting at points, with the tiniest hints of flashback, that it’s related to growing up in a cult (or, in shorthand, “my fucking childhood”) – as if there’s something pathological about finding oneself on the dom/sub spectrum, being magnetized by the poles of power, or craving the risk of self-destruction.
To be fair, Reijn draws out a difficult tension – Romy is, on the one hand, imploding in rarefied air. She’s a female CEO, swaddled in beige cashmere with a wall-to-wall-windows apartment in New York, a woman of unique material power. But Reijn seems interested in tackling more common themes: the straitjacket of expectations for female leaders; society’s profound disinterest in female pleasure, as internalized by many women as shame; the orgasm gap (Romy eventually claims to have never climaxed with her husband of 19 years, which I struggled to believe). There’s a midlife crisis; the pressures of ageing; attempts to break out of one’s domestic, professional or personal roles, or at least make the contradictions coherent to ourselves.
There is propulsion, catharsis, relief in even addressing these topics, which remain largely off-screen and unspoken. Perhaps the bravest moment in a performance rightfully hailed as brave – not actually devoid of fear, rather pushing through it for something genuinely startling – is when Kidman, as Romy, subjects her face to a clinical white light and a Botox needle, blurring the line between female CEO enduring the relentless pressures of ageing, and Kidman the actor with a face so notoriously stiff it has confined her to playing rich women. Like The Substance, another recent buzzy film from a European female director starring an iconic, middle-aged 90s actor, Babygirl wins significant points for going there, even if the critique is more fizzle than pop.
But that’s besides the sex, and the sex is supposed to be the show here. It’s not that Babygirl should explain why Romy is drawn to submission – there doesn’t need to be a why! – but that it only fleetingly explores the how. How Samuel pushes Romy’s boundaries, how Romy allows her boundaries to be pushed with a palpable mix of trepidation, shame and shock, the mutual thrill of going off-script. Those scenes – at a nondescript storage room at the office, the first steps of dom/sub play at a hotel – are taut and genuinely surprising, some of my favorite of the year, if not as out-there as some may hope. (Still, my screening was full of nervous laughter and multiple, out-loud “whats”.) Babygirl highlights the erotic potential of everything other than penetrative sex, which we glimpse only briefly, almost as a sight of denouement after everything else; it also muddles it through a workplace thriller, erotic thriller and family drama, never settling on one and always splitting the difference.
Still, the movie-going public is so sex-starved, and the focus on women’s sexual horizons so infrequent – let alone beyond age 30 – that it still feels remarkable for this movie to exist. I am for sure grading on a curve. Babygirl struggles to reconcile the specifics of these characters’ desires – or really, just Romy’s, as Dickinson’s Samuel is an escape hatch to her and a cipher to us – with the politics of it. Romy craves oblivion, feels the pull of self-annihilation, enters a volatile situation, and? She’s committed a clear HR violation, but also found personal liberation, but sex never happens in a vacuum, and? And so we get provocative, occasionally startling moments that don’t coalesce beyond contained, sometimes sublime fantasy, as when Reijn needle-drops George Michael’s Father Figure during one rendezvous after a milk-slurping standoff. Babygirl is very much a film of the times – visual panache over the mechanics of story, moments over cohesion, the magnetism of premise and star power above all else. Not exactly what you want, as the marketing promised, but so much better than nothing.
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Babygirl is out in US cinemas now and in the UK on 10 January
Source: theguardian.com
