Director: Halina Reijn
Stars: Sophie Wilde, Harris Dickinson, Nicole Kidman
If you want to quickly settle the recurring debate about the sexlessness of modern day cinema, take a trip down to your local multiplex and catch a screening of Babygirl with a fresh young audience reared on endless Harry Potter reruns and quarterly visits from the MCU fairy. You’ll hear – around you in the darkness – dozens of young people losing their tiny minds, not knowing how to react to a frank and serious film on the topic of sex. I saw Babygirl in such a venue, with such an audience, and it was bedlam. Even the blood red ’18’ certificate warning of “strong sex” was enough to cause cacophonous nervous giggling. What followed seemed to provoke a consistent urge to ridicule, dismiss, belittle and run wildly in and out of the room. But not, I think, because Halina Reijn’s film was failing to grapple with it’s topic, but because it was doing so successfully, pushing the defensive barriers up.
It’s worth pointing out at this juncture that Babygirl isn’t all that explicit. Granted, it opens on a sex scene followed immediately by a masturbation scene – as unfulfilled Manhattan business tycoon Romy (Nicole Kidman) dashes from the marital bed to secretly pleasure herself in front of the harsh glow of her laptop screen – but Reijn is more interested in the emotional complexities of a dom/sub relationship, particularly from the vantage point of female desire and long-repressed fantasy. Somehow that still manages to create peculiar discomfort, even in the supposedly open-minded Gen Z populous peppering my local Vue. 60 years on from Belle de Jour, we’re still trying to understand how to respond to a privileged woman wanting – needing – to feel subjugated.
Filling a void Romy wasn’t fully able to articulate comes puckishly confident intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson). He selects Romy as his mentor in a scheme she wasn’t even aware she’d been made a part of, cockishly subverting their assumed power dynamic from the get-go. It’s as though these two smell each other out. Much of their early communication lacks verbal definition, but is played out in Reijn’s blocking and in the body language conveyed by Kidman and Dickinson. They’re cagily magnetic. Romy finds herself letting Samuel get away with the kinds of behaviours one might readily contact HR over. Indeed, that Romy’s dalliances with Samuel are high-stakes for her – her job and reputation are on the line – only add a further dimension of risk and therefore excitement to the younger man’s commanding allure.
One of the masterstrokes of Babygirl is that Samuel is by no means a finished product. While he holds a facade of confidence in his approach to Romy, it becomes clear that he’s improvising just as much as she is, finding his way through each of their interactions with flashes of disarming – and affecting – humility. Reijn is smart enough to acknowledge the awkwardness of roleplay, the humanity of the moments when the pretense subtly breaks, and the intrinsic funniness of sex. Letting these moments of fragility into the spicier scenes between Romy and Samuel allows her to eschew much of the cringe-worthy, robotic austerity that undermines a lot of sex in movies. It also complicates what could have played out as a simplified depiction of a man bullishly asserting his dominance. It may sound contradictory, but by letting humour and weakness in, she makes her approach to sex more serious and compelling.
If Bodies Bodies Bodies suggested that Reijn might be a safe pair of hands to DJ a party, Babygirl all but confirms it. Source music selections provide hit after hit. If the excellent Le Tigre at a teenager’s birthday party is a little too cool for school, she’s more than forgiven when a major montage sequence in the film rides to glory on the swelling sounds of George Michael’s ‘Father Figure’. An early contender for the thirstiest needle-drop of the year. Reijn also continues her preoccupation with bodies, manifesting here both in Romy’s wavering confidence in her own skin as she ages, and in the more immediate, heady throng of a staggeringly-mounted night club scene (one of the best of it’s kind).
Returning to Romy’s self-image for a moment, Babygirl manages a subtler treaty on the perils of aging for career women than The Substance did, layering in a further power dynamic as Romy finds herself pitted against her sweet yet ambitious aide Esme (Sophie Wilde). Samuel politely flatters Romy that she needn’t resort to treatments like Botox, but these procedures highlight the precariousness of Romy’s perception of her own position. When we meet her she is already quietly clinging to handrails just to remain in place. Her tersely navigated affair with Samuel is revealed, over time, to be a required jolt to her own evolution.
Babygirl is decidedly current, with concerns like increased automation and evolving mental health awareness orbiting the central narrative. Wonderfully underplayed, also, is Romy and her husband Jacob’s (Antonio Banderas) interest and concern in their older teenage daughter Isabel’s (Esther McGregor) burgeoning sexuality. It’s a nicely judged act of normalisation, a gesture from Reijn to parents in the audience who might be wondering how to navigate these same waters.
If things come to a sudden and orderly resolution, Reijn has taken us on a thoughtful and stylish journey, cannily peppered with enough juice and humour to allow her meatier ideas and provocations to go down smoothly. Babygirl feels both researched and inherently understood by its maker. Candid, grown-up dissections of the psychology of sex and desire – particularly from the perspectives of women – are both all-too-rare and more than welcome in our often tempered cinema spaces (so long as people can adjust to receiving them without freaking the fuck out).
And even when it seems as though Reijn has neatly tied a bow on her narrative, she still finds time to send us back into the world on a shrieking climax.
Good for her.
The Lost Highway Hotel 