'Babygirl' Review: What Do Women Want?
When a film opens to black, the only sound a woman’s orgasmic moaning, as does Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, you know you’re in for a good time. The moans are revealed to be coming from Romy, played by Nicole Kidman, shot vertiginously from above, as she straddles her husband, Jacob, played by Antonio Banderas, in a perfect simulation of hotter-than-average-older-people having sex.
But a simulation it very much turns out to be, at least as far as Romy is concerned. The moment Jacob has rolled over in post-coital cosiness, she’s hotfooting it down the hall to masturbate to internet porn, belly-down on the bathroom floor. This time, when she orgasms for real, the sounds she makes are different: animalistic and guttural.
Babygirl, which has already won critical acclaim in the US where it was released on Christmas Day, is set up as a kind of riposte to the steamy erotic thrillers of the 1980s and 1990s: Fatal Attraction and 9 ½ Weeks and what have you. Reijn, who wrote, produced and directed it, has said she was inspired by the “orgasm gap” – the phenomenon described in a 2017 study that found a marked disparity between how frequently men and women in heterosexual relationships experience climax – as the opening sequence efficiently demonstrates.
In Reijn’s film, the focus is on the female sexual experience and what women, if they weren't suppressing their desires to accommodate someone else’s, might want. But what do they want? Do they even know? In these confusing times it may not be clear, but that doesn’t mean that Reijn – and Kidman, in an astonishingly committed performance for which she won the best actress award at the Venice Film Festival – can’t have fun trying to find out.
Romy is the kind of character that we might think we’ve seen a lot of from Kidman of late. She’s a high-powered boss, a supportive wife, an attentive mother, albeit one who looks like she’s made of porcelain and about to crack. She lives in a glossy New York apartment, wears expensive clothes that often look like they’re trying to strangle her and keeps up an age-defying beauty regime that resembles high-tech torture.
In her day job, she is the icy CEO of a robotics company called Tensile, the business of which, in Andreas Gursky-esque shots, is shown to be the automation of enormous product distribution warehouses (if the name “Tensile” wasn’t enough of a wink at the film’s subject, and its tone, you might recall that those warehouses are also known as “fulfilment centres”).
Into Romy’s purview comes a new intern at Tensile, Samuel – played by the British actor Harris Dickinson – who has a wonky haircut and a thrilling disregard for corporate hierarchy. Like the Cesar Millan of Unhappy Lady Bosses, Samuel immediately senses something in Romy: some psychosexual need in her that he might be able to meet (in fact, in Romy and Samuel’s first encounter on the street outside the office, before they’ve formally met, he shows he’s not bad at reading unhappy dogs either). The two begin a kinky affair that is both high-stakes and steamy – though the sex is never particularly explicitly portrayed – with Samuel giving the orders but Romy getting the kicks.
A word should be said about Dickinson, whose recent filmography includes bleak wrestling tragedy The Iron Claw and Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, and who deftly holds his own against Kidman while bringing to Samuel an oddness that is endearing and unexpected. At times Samuel’s strident commands give way to boyish sheepishness, revealing he doesn’t really know what he’s doing either; it’s a nuanced performance that makes Samuel more than a fantasy cypher or a prospective bunny-boiler, and shows why Dickinson is one of the most subtle and interesting of the current crop of young male actors.
Really, though, this is Kidman’s film. As the stakes get higher – Samuel turns up at her house and teases blackmail – Romy becomes the brittle, clammy physical embodiment of the film’s narrative tensions. For an actor with a rep for doing buttoned-up, her portrayal of Romy’s sexual awakening is outrageously brave, and while it’s not impossible I’m conflating women of a certain age getting naked with good acting (see also Demi Moore in The Substance), I still can’t help but take my hat (and only my hat) off to them.
But about those stakes. If there is a criticism to be levelled at Babygirl, which some have, it is that it doesn’t feel quite dangerous enough. Without wishing to give too many spoilers, no one seems to be an out-and-out psychopath or a depraved sex fiend; unlike in, say, Hedda Gabler, a production of which Banderas’s Jacob, a loveably self-absorbed theatre director, just so happens to be staging, no characters will necessarily receive fatal moral censure. What is surprising about the film – and is also, in my view, its strength – is just how warm it is, and funny (I was also fairly keen on Reijn’s last film, Bodies, Bodies, Bodies).
But perhaps we’ve got the genre all wrong. Maybe we should consider Babygirl less an erotic thriller and more an elevated meet-cute, a Christmassy movie about an unhappy woman with lightly masochistic interests and the strapping young suitor who comes along at just the right time: a dom-com, if you will. It’s a smart, sexy film about being a woman that explores – with humour and a lightness of touch – some of the modern-day roles they perform; which predicates female sexuality without feeling the compunction to punish its protagonist. Romy makes some decisions that might be professionally dicey, but, the film seems to say, if they’re spiritually satisfying, so the fuck what? In this way, perhaps, Babygirl does give women what a taste of what they want, at least until the credits roll.
Babygirl is out in cinemas on 10 January
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