Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson in ‘Babygirl.’
Niko Tavernise/A24
Movies have been absolutely peerless when it comes to giving the world a chance to gaze at desirable females. What the seventh art has been notoriously bad at is exploring the concept of female desire, in all of its complexities and clandestine, dark-corner complications. This is where Babygirl comes in. An exploration of a charged sexual relationship between a female CEO and her young, male intern that ends up finding freedom in sub-dom dynamics, this drama from Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijns leans heavily into the power structures inherent in such December-May affairs. The question quickly becomes: Which party genuinely holds the power, and which gets pleasure by giving in and giving it away?
When we meet Nicole Kidman’s tech-company executive Romy, she’s in the middle of intimate relations with her theater-director husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas). After they coo post-coital sweet nothings to each other, Romy quietly slips away into the other room and furiously masturbates to online porn. She loves her spouse, her two teenage daughters, her high-powered company building robots for Amazon-like warehouses, her tony New York apartment and the family’s quaint getaway upstate. But satisfaction — the carnal-knowledge kind — eludes her. Even specifically issued instructions in bed end in flushed embarrassment and frustration.
Harris Dickinson in ‘Babygirl.’Niko Tavernise/A24
Enter Samuel (Dickinson, likely to cause damp brows and sweaty palms by the dozens). Even before they formally meet, Romy spies him forcing an aggressive dog to sit and heel in the street. There’s something about the way he bends the wild animal to his will that makes her take notice. Later in the office, Samuel makes an impudent comment during the interns’ group introduction and, during a one-on-one, cracks that what she really wants is to not to control but be controlled. It’s inappropriate, but not inaccurate. During work drinks at a bar, Samuel sends her over a glass of milk. She gulps it down. Soon, he literally has her lapping that same beverage out of a saucer like a kitten. And the master-and-servant foreplay has barely even begun.
Reijn’s previous movie was the 2022 millennial horror-comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies, but it’s her debut movie Instinct (2019), in which Game of Thrones’ Carice van Houten is a prison therapist infatuated with a rapist client, that set a precedent for this subversive take on prying open the Pandora’s box of sexual repression. Babygirl tries to deftly waltz over this minefield of a topic without a sense of puritanical judgement or heavy panting, but with as much emphasis on Romy’s need for this transfer of power to tap into her erogenous zones. Occasionally it trips over its own stiletto-heeled feet, and you sometimes feel like it’s one food montage away from becoming 9 ½ Weeks: The 21st Century Edition. (It may still do for saucers of milk what that Adrian Lyne film did for cherry-pie filling.)
Yet it’s Kidman — and specifically, her willingness to go there in terms of presenting a sexual liason involving humiliation, shame and ultimately satisfaction — who keeps this drama from devolving into Skinemax-by-numbers. She hasn’t exactly been timid in portraying characters whose desires occasionally stray into the realm of kink, or at least kink-adjacent; this is the actor who dove headfirst into Eyes Wide Shut, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Destroyer and The Paperboy, after all. And though the word “brave” gets thrown around pretty liberally in regards to screen turns, Kidman earns the descriptive here. You can chart her character’s journey from reticence and confusion over her giving in to her needs, her anger at herself for even entertaining the idea, the sense of libidinous liberation once she does, the mix of relief and shame over having done so, and the immediate sense of wanting more. Did we mention this whole thing is communicated without a word in a sequence in which her character reluctantly climaxes?
It’s not just that Kidman shows you this woman’s sexual fulfillment — it’s the way she gives you everything happening around it, in the most intimate and telling of ways. And that’s why this feels like the most naked performance this A-list star has ever given, with the physical exposure being the least vulnerable aspect of it all. The way she balances this woman’s inner conflict, not to mention the sense of risk that provides the real erotic thrill, never falters or less than high-feverish even when the script does her no favors.
From the title on, Babygirl feels designed to get tongues wagging rather than lolling. It will start conversations about consent, the fetishization of control and the forbidden rush of crossing a half-dozen lines far more than the usual cougarsploitation. Even the lessons-learned ending leans toward the healing power of deviancy under the supervision of a designated driver. But Kidman makes you feel like this isn’t just a provocation so much as a tantalizing what if. As in: What if a movie was to take female sexuality outside of the vanilla realm seriously? What if the fodder of an “adult movie” could be turned into something as unique as a movie for real adults?
From Rolling Stone US.
Source link
