One of the more surprising things about “Babygirl”, the upcoming erotic thriller from Halina Reijn, is how often it resists making its characters symbols or avatars for ‘very important discussions’.
There are no late-film monologues where they clumsily voice a contemporary discourse on sex, womanhood, infidelity, or ageing. Certainly, the film contemplates these ideas and several others in its setting. But, its gaze is sharply focused on its specific characters trapped in their specific milieu. The focus is its asset. The rhythms of Reijn’s playful and sexy direction in “Babygirl” make for an intoxicating balancing act. It is a story of a female CEO’s adulterous relationship with a male intern, but it is also a film that manages to exude a knowing litheness, while managing to be sharply attuned to the emotional and sexual desires of its characters. “Babygirl” resists presenting any of its characters as particularly bad people and delights in stoking our interest by making the illicit sexual romp into something stimulating and heady fun, even when it is exacting and even devastating.
Reijna, a Dutch actress turned filmmaker, made her directorial debut with “Instinct” in 2019, a Dutch-language thriller about a prison therapist who becomes obsessed with a charismatic serial-rapist on the verge of parole.
That film was just ambitious, but less adept, in its interplay between sexual politics, gender and desire. But even in that debut film, Reijn’s willingness to push representations of female sexual desire was clear. And, in Nicole Kidman, she’s found an able partner in “Babygirl” and its wily contemporary provocations.
Kidman has long been one of the more audacious actors of her career, willing to forge into genres and characters of all types.
Since her Emmy-winning turn on “Big Little Lies” relaunched her global success, she has been committed to working on film and television with new, young, female directors. “Babygirl” is the product of one such union. In it, Kidmaaaan’s cinematic skill for weaving complex characterisations on screen feels rejuvenated. Her high-ranking CEO Romy Mathis feels not just like a casual character to inhabit but becomes a compelling reassessment of Kidman’s own public persona. The schism between the two reveals a daring performance, and one of her finest on screen.
Chances are that if you read the comments under any video featuring Nicole Kidman on the internet in the last few years, you are likely to see a familiar argument breaking out. A random commenter will interject that they cannot watch Kidman’s projects because of how much “work” she’s done to her face. The comment will launch a long thread of discussion, some opposing the claims, on whether she can still move her face.
The irresistibility of this trend of discussion has always seemed strange since Kidman’s prolific output over the last decade has been sustained and dynamic but it’s also a sign of what it means to age as a woman in Hollywood.
It’s the kind of enquiry that has marked several films this year, including ones like “The Substance” that play around with the public personas of its stars.
When Romy gazes into the mirror and oils her face, or when she glides through the halls of her office with all eyes on her, the demands of what it means to be a woman in the public eye feels exacting, and feels bound to Kidman’s own public-facing life since the 1990s.
When we see her pleasant, but not altogether stimulating life, with her husband (Antonio Banderas as Jacob, a stage director) we can sense a life that is comfortable, but we can also sense Romy’s desire for more.
The cracks are there early, though. After a seemingly fine sexual encounter with her husband, Romy goes to the bathroom to masturbate while looking at lightly tinged BDSM pornography. It sets up the later extramarital affair with a sharp sense of meaning that “Babygirl” teases throughout.
Romy first meets Samuel (Harris Dickinson) not as her intern, but a stranger who is able to pacify a menacing dog on a street. As Samuel emerges from the crowd, almost as if by magic, to coax the dog while whispering “good girl” to her, the camera zooms in on Kidman’s face with a startlingly humorous cadence. Are they really going there? Yes, they are. And it’s credit to “Babygirl” that it goes there while resisting anything lurid, over-determined, or exploitative about the way it shoots the sexual moments when they come. Although the film is not explicitly legible on the dynamics of BDSM relationships or even particularly curious on spelling them out with more candour, that approach seems right for Romy. Your move is likely to vary on whether Romy’s desires are particularly that perverse to begin with.
What’s more important to Reijn, and to Kidman, is that we view Romy’s journey to sexual abandon as one important to her and significant to her. Kidman’s tremendous performance is the best asset to “Babygirl”. And with her, it succeeds.
“Babygirl” is, perhaps, a tiny bit too resistant to giving in to its messiest tendencies; in its final act, it swerves. But within that propensity for tidiness, I am charmed by its unwillingness to turn the story into one that is maudlin or mawkish. Reijn is not interested in exploring the melodramatic possibilities of genre, but in something slyer and more playful.
In one of the final scenes, where an older male employee appears as a potential harbinger of danger, Reijn reminds us that this is not that kind of film. “Babygirl” is filled with canny moments like this that recontextualise what we think ought to be its focus. Significantly, it does this all while being thrillingly erotic. Despite the moral dynamics of its plot, “Babygirl” approaches sex as something exciting and fun and sexy.
There is no moralistic finger-wagging here but something intriguingly modern. Even when it avoids some complications with its sexual daringness, I’m grateful for the richness of this as an adult drama directed with a technical efficiency that complicates and reconfigures some of its simpler ideas through formal elements. Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s score is a heady and arresting counterpoint for the sexual suspense of the film, and keeps on adding sonic thrills to the visual ones.
Matthew Hannam’s editing, meanwhile, uses montage with such lithe deftness that “Babygirl” feels much shorter than 114 minutes running-time. Its sharpest trick is its hyper-focus lens on this woman in this marriage in this time without insistence on generalising or universalising its tensions. This is not an interrogation of the zeitgeist, but merely an extension of one restless woman amidst the fray.
Babygirl opens in local cinemas on Boxing Day
