Babygirl
Nicole Kidman has won all the awards, but she’s as patchy as the Pakistan cricket team. This makes it hard to understand how, when the very best version of Our Nic turned up for Babygirl, she has failed to receive an Oscar nomination. In the past Kidman scored nominations for Moulin Rouge! - surely one of the most unwatchable films ever made, and Lion - one of the most overrated. She took out the big prize in 2002 for playing Virginia Woolf in The Hours, which must be counted an uncharacteristic role.
Babygirl itself never scored a nomination this year, although there are films on the shortlist for Best Picture that are palpably inferior - Wicked!, for instance, a cartoonish, Hollywood cash-in on a popular musical. Being so roundly snubbed may be a tribute to the movie’s power, as Dutch writer-director, Halina Reijn, has achieved the rare feat of making a genuinely erotic mainstream feature. It’s not sexy in a flashy, fleshy manner, it’s a psychological drama that burrows into the viewer’s mind, portraying a woman caught in a tightly woven mesh of lust and anxiety.
In our prudish, moralistic age, Babygirl portrays an aspect of the sexual impulse that doesn’t fit the prevailing templates but feels unnervingly true. Kidman plays Romy Mathis, a super successful businesswoman in her mid-50s, who is CEO of a major tech firm, with homes, clothes and lifestyle to match her status. She’s married to Jacob (Antonio Banderas) a theatre director, with two teenage daughters. The elder (Esther McGregor) has already come out as gay, with no objections from her enlightened parents.
The only problem is that something is wrong in Romy and Jacob’s sex life. After intercourse, she sneaks off and watches porn to bring herself to orgasm. None of this impacts her working life, where she employs all the slickest modern management techniques, presiding over a team of eager young workers who look to her as a role model. It’s only when she encounters Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a handsome, self-possessed intern in his early 20s, that the pristine structure of her life starts to unravel.
Romy is accustomed to staff deferring to her authority, but Samuel is not only willing to talk back, he’s downright insolent, with a suggestion of Asperger’s. On the other hand, he is insistent on wanting her to be his mentor. Romy tries and fails to put him in his place, feeling herself in the grip of a powerful sexual attraction. In a bar he sends her a large glass of milk, and watches with satisfaction as she wilfully gulps it down.
Samuel seems awkward and taciturn but has a warped genius for reading people’s character. He knows Romy is hooked, but he’s not about to worship at her feet. On the contrary, in this clandestine relationship, where she begins by telling him he’s very young, and she doesn’t want to hurt him, he will be the master. Samuel assumes Romy is tired of being the boss and hungry to be dominated. She’s shocked and insulted but soon finds herself succumbing to his commands. She’s come too far to back out, and in surrendering herself she finds a sexual fulfilment she never received from her husband.
In the most audacious sex scene in this film, Samuel experiments with his power, telling Romy to take off her panties, then to strip naked. She obeys, not without sighs of wounded dignity, but clearly turned on by the game. Director, Halina Reijn has learned that it requires only one memorable scene to imbue an entire film with a heightened sense of anticipation. Hitchcock includes a single brutal murder in Psycho, but it stays with us throughout the movie. In Babygirl there is only one sequence in which Romy is fully naked, but it releases an erotic charge that never dissipates.
The sexual tension is heightened when Samuel begins doing disturbing things, such as inviting himself to Romy’s home, on the pretext of couriering material from the office, and chatting cordially with her husband and daughters. At every step he keeps racheting up the level of threat, testing Romy’s reactions and enjoying her discomfort. He’s fiercely attracted to her well-preserved 50-something body but needles her with insults about her age. Romy resents the humiliations, but by now, every stab of pain has become a perverse pleasure.
As her emotions overtake her sense of self-preservation, Romy begins to lose control. We know this reckless affair is going to hit a brick wall, and we wait, on the edge of our seats, for the crash. All this is handled so expertly it suggests that Reijn could only have written this story from personal experience, and that her directorial skills have been severely underrated by the Academy. We may not see another film this year that is so tense and dramatically involving.
Babygirl puts the viewer on the spot, asking us to interrogate our own responses to Romy’s slide from Supreme Ruler to Samuel’s puppet. On what level are we enjoying this sado-masochistic charade? Are we identifying with one participant or the other? Feeling uncomfortable is the logical response, as we watch a powerful woman throw it all away at the irresistable urgings of her middle-aged libido.
This is not the kind of story one might expect today, when all the emphasis is on female empowerment. If anything, it’s reminiscent of provocative movies of the 1990s such as Paul Verheoven’s Basic Instinct (1992). What is it with the Dutch? As filmmakers they have seriously kinky imaginations.
Babygirl is a twisted fantasy and a comedy of embarrassment, but it has a sense of psychological truth. Romy is not the first successful public figure to nurture the secret urge to be dominated or humiliated, but I’d always understood it as a syndrome in which the British led the way. It’s a daring manoeuvre to make it a woman who savours her own degradation, and a brave actress who would take on such a role. The actress who seems to specialise in such parts is Isabelle Huppert, but Kidman’s brilliant, fearless performance shows she is just as capable of going over to the dark side when the occasion demands. In the increasingly bloated, PC milieu of big budget Hollywood, this film arrives like an explosive device.
Babygirl
Written & directed by Halina Reijn
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas, Sophie Wilde, Esther McGregor, Vaughan Reilly, Victor Slezak
Netherlands/USA, MA 15+, 114 mins