‘Babygirl’ Review: Nicole Kidman Is A Woman On The Verge In Halina Reijn’s Sexually Charged S&M Story – Venice Film Festival
Halina Reijn’s frank sexual odyssey begins as it means to go on, with a level of candor that many audiences will find hard to process. They’ll buy into Nicole Kidman’s performance alright, since it’s hard to ignore the amount of dedication, not to mention naked flesh, that she brings to the role. But though there are wry laughs to be had, from the exquisite awkwardness of the setup alone, Babygirl was received by many at its Venice premiere as a comedy, which trivializes the extraordinary atmosphere that Reijn creates. Her experiences working as an actor for Paul Verhoeven (on 2006’s Black Books) clearly rubbed off, since her third feature owes a small debt to his controversial revenge thriller Elle, which raised a similarly provocative debate about male aggression and female sexuality.
If that sounds intense, you may fall at the opening fence; Babygirl opens on Kidman’s face as her character Romy Mathis (seemingly) experiences an intense orgasm while making love to her husband Jacob (Antonia Banderas). Within minutes of this heroic performance, however, Romy is scuttling off to her laptop, where she pleasures herself while looking at a dubious S&M site. We only hear the online exchange, but the female voice is clearly subservient, playing out some kind of unsettling sub-dom roleplay with an older man. Returning to bed, she quite earnestly asks Jacob, “I want to watch porn while you have sex with me,” a line that makes Jacob uncomfortable and elicited nervous laughter in Venice.
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This turns out to be quite a surprising insight into the depths of Romy’s mind, revealing to us a secret vulnerability that she keeps far, far away from her family and work colleagues. Romy is the CEO of Tensile, a computerized delivery service company that exists to, as Romy puts it, “automate repetitive tasks and give people their time back.” To everyone else she is in “the robot business,” in stark contrast to Jacob, who is currently wrestling with a Broadway production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Jacob is loose and arty, but Romy is dressed up and buttoned down. “Look up, smile, and never show your weakness,” she says to a film crew making a corporate video before being told that admitting to having any kind of weakness at all is, in itself, a weakness.
It’s a small moment but a telling one that illustrates the expectations placed upon women in management; Romy aspires to the myth of having it all. In the film’s most audacious moments, she is seen having Botox, and her two daughters make fun of her cosmetic surgery (“You look weird, like a dead fish,” says one). Something dark lies in Romy’s past, however. She tells a colleague that she was named after a guru and grew up in “communities and cults,” a background that we glimpse only fleetingly as she takes part in a series of arcane therapies, the precise purposes of which are never explained.
Romy’s life changes after something strange happens on the way to work. Outside her office, a vicious black dog comes hurtling towards her. She fears the worst, but the dog is called off by a stranger, a young man in a crumpled parka who soothes the dog with a cookie. Romy is mesmerized, and is surprised when the same man appears in her office as part of the new intake of interns. Samuel (Harris Dickinson), whose name will be withheld for quite some time, fascinates Romy, from the moment he insults her with a sarcastic question about her fondness for altruistic mission statements (“Do you really mean that, or is the kind of thing you say to make people like robots?”).
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Samuel seems to turn up everywhere, notably in the company’s illicit smoking areas, and even solicits her as a mentor on a training program she doesn’t even know she’s a part of. She attends their first meeting under duress, and Samuel exploits her discomfort, opening a portal into her mind with a statement that lodges in her head: “You like being told what to do.” So begins an extraordinary relationship that sees Samuel testing the mechanisms of her repressed sexuality: Romy is aroused by potentially humiliating high-stakes situations, which create a fascinating tension when Samuel begins to date her assistant Esme (Sophie Wilde) on the side. With what they know, they can bring her perfect life crashing to the ground, both a catastrophic eventuality — and a terrific turn-on.
Kidman really goes the distance, imbuing Romy with a psychological vulnerability that is missing from the film it most obvious sounds like (50 Shades of Grey) and presenting a unique reversal of the film it most obviously looks like (Secretary). Dickinson, too, is an inspired piece of casting, manifesting like a monster from the id with his dorky, knife-and-fork haircut and clothes that he appears to have put on with a shovel. The chalk-and-cheese appeal is never really resolved, which Reijn uses to the film’s benefit: she leaves so much up in the air that Babygirl lasts longer in the mind than you think it might, opening up a slipstream for female artists who are ready and willing to take such hot-button issues — women, sexuality and power — and take them to even wilder extremes.
Title: Babygirl
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Distributor: A24
Release date: December 25, 2024
Director-screenwriter: Halina Reijn
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas, Sophie Wilde, Esther McGregor
Running time: 1 hr 54 mins
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