It takes a film of real chutzpah to needle-drop George Michael’s ‘Father Figure’ into a dom/sub seduction scene and not only get away with possibly the most glaringly on-the-nose musical cue in the history of cinema, but have it hold the moment perfectly.
Halina Reijn’s Babygirl is that movie: a deliciously barbed, but wise and ultimately hopeful investigation of female sexual desire, marriage and modern power dynamics that takes a hundred touchpoints, from ’80s erotic thrillers to the indie candour of Sex, Lies and Videotape and Secretary, and does something completely new with them. Nicole Kidman and Harrison Dickinson are magnificent as the age-(and-HR)-inappropriate duo who disappear into a supercharged office relationship that turns out to be a paradise, maze and prison – all at once.
Kidman is Romy, the respected and successful CEO of a company that manufactures robots for Amazon-like warehouses. With her iPhone glued to her palm, she’s jokingly accused of being like one of her own automatons, but her human complexities are there from the first scene. She has seemingly satisfying sex with her doting husband (Antonio Banderas), only to slip away straight afterwards to masturbate to BDSM porn.
At work, twentysomething intern Samuel (Dickinson) has an eerie sense of Romy’s unfulfilled needs. He asks for her to be his mentor and she reluctantly agrees, amused by his front. That amusement turns to arousal when he speaks to her in a way no one else would dare. Soon, they’re having an office romance with a saltily BDSM flavour. They head to dumpy Manhattan hotels for awkward trysts where Romy’s reluctance and fear of discovery gradually give way to full submission.
You will never look at a saucer of milk the same way again
Even considering those five Oscar nominations, it’s hard to think of a better, or more committed Kidman performance. And Dickinson, adding a wolfish glint of James Spader to Triangle of Sadness’s lost-boy male model, is a match for her. Both of them tackle the many sex scenes with zero modesty. You will never look at a saucer of milk or the chocolate on your hotel pillow the same way again.
Not as slinkily arch as Secretary nor as lurid as Disclosure, Babygirl is more of a wickedly funny erotic chamber piece than a ’90s-style sex thriller. And it’s made with real empathy by Reijn. The Bodies Bodies Bodies director told the media at the Venice Film Festival that she wanted her film to bridge the Hollywood’s ‘orgasm gap’, where female pleasure takes a backseat to that of male characters. Mission accomplished, in sweaty and seductive style.
Babygirl premiered at the Venice Film Festival.