Ever since silent film audiences swooned for Rudolph Valentino and the vamp Theda Bara, the movies have packed a sexual charge. But filmmakers have always had trouble dealing with sex head-on. While there have been scads of "hot" love scenes, movies addressing sexual desire nearly always feel bogus — exploitative, moralistic or unintentionally funny. Even Stanley Kubrick foundered in making Eyes Wide Shut, a dreamlike movie in which Tom Cruise was a husband haunted, and aroused, by the possible infidelity of his wife, played by Nicole Kidman.
We enter a similar dreamland in Babygirl, a new film by Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn that boasts a thrillingly haywire performance by Kidman, who's our bravest, most risk-taking actress. Set during a seemingly eternal Christmas season, Babygirl begins with a classic cliché — the high-powered career woman who secretly yearns for sexual submission to a man — and transforms it into a strange fantasy of empowerment.
Kidman stars as Romy Mathis, the CEO of a high-tech shipping company in New York. She's got a country house, two cool daughters and a husband, Jacob, who's so attractive he's played by Antonio Banderas. But — and it's a decisive but — their sex life has never worked for Romy. Nineteen years into her marriage, she fakes extravagant orgasms then sneaks away to satisfy herself while watching dodgy domination porn.
All that changes one morning when, walking to work, she watches a striking young man (played by Harris Dickinson) tame a big, out-of-control dog. As in a dream, this same striking young man immediately turns up in the company offices as a new intern, Samuel.
At once mumbling and aggressive, like a '50s method actor, Samuel somehow sees straight into Romy's roiling psyche. Their early meetings always have a sexual edge, and Samuel senses that Romy fantasizes about being ordered what to do.
Though she initially resists his inappropriate forwardness — getting involved with interns is, after all, strictly forbidden — we know it's only a matter of time. After a bit of verbal sparring, he has Romy doing his bidding in the bedroom. He calls her "Babygirl," and helps her achieve the pleasure she's longed for.
Given the unusual dynamic of this relationship — she's his boss at work, he's her boss in bed — Babygirl promises a daringly grown-up look at both sexuality and power. Yet for all the early talk about the movie being "transgressive" — to use a played-out buzzword — I was struck by how tame it is. Even as Romy says she needs sexual danger, none of her desires take her or the movie anyplace truly dark — or even fifty shades of grey.
Now to her credit, Reijn makes a point of not trying to turn us on; she dishes up none of the laughable nudie sleaze found in movies like, say, 9 1/2 Weeks. Yet, in her fixation on Romy's inner life — whose every throb and flicker Kidman heroically registers — she makes the classic Hollywood mistake of shortchanging everything else. For starters, we have no sense of who Samuel actually is or what he wants.
This matters in a film where both Romy and Samuel keep using the word "power." Romy may run the company but she's also an HR nightmare; Samuel could shipwreck her career with a few well-chosen words. I kept waiting to find out what Samuel is after and what tough choices their dangerous liaison will force her to make. That's precisely what happens in Catherine Breillat's great new film Last Summer, in which another successful middle-aged woman commits a far greater transgression than Romy, then fights, even cruelly, to get herself out of the mess.
There's no such reckoning here. Reijn is so eager not to punish Romy for her sexual tastes that the film raises questions of power only to duck them. Babygirl's problem is not Romy's desire to be dominated. It's making her erotic liberation so triumphant that the story's sexual politics don't matter.
All of which feels out of touch with our post-MeToo era. After all, if a male CEO had kinky sex with a young female intern, I don't think current audiences would give him a pass just because she made him happier in bed than his wife.
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