In this year’s radius of shockingly great films, Babygirl’s placement – Nicole Kidman winning the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival, the number-one film of TIME, the title’s listing at the National Board of Review – will amount of waves of confusion once it reaches a larger audience. What is the movie, really? A thriller that promises sensual voltage to the wrong places? The guise of marketable eroticism that would then uncover Best-Of performances? These, along with the A24 showmanship of in-crowd provocation, will spike expectations of memorable sex scenes, That Acting moment, and who the term “babygirl” applies to. But I don’t believe that this is a film people think it will be about, which is to say that I absolutely love it, cried when I didn’t mean to, and had fallen hard for Kidman’s humbling deconstruction of the human desire.
Though admittedly, Babygirl will start off the way that you expect it to. The opening scene is an overhead of Kidman, who plays Romy, in mid-coital action with her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas, going for the Lands’ End catalog-father rather than his usual lecherous timberwolf form). After they’re done, Romy quietly sneaks to another room in the house and finishes herself off to a rough-play porn video on her laptop. The house is quiet. Romy does not worry that her husband or her teenage daughters will look for her.
Her invisibility, powered by her roles as a dissatisfied wife and unappreciated mother, is then sliced by the next scene, where she is found in her apex predator territory. Romy is the CEO of an Amazon-type automated delivery service (it is probably much smarter and more innovative than the film cares to share), but the status of her position in the company and how she got there – she’s alpha-smart, as we find out in another scene – is more important than what the company really means, because it is then challenged by the introduction of Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a young intern who she first encounters on the NYC sidewalk when he heels a large dog before it attacks her.
She quietly stares at him, he aggressively pursues her, “How dare you!”, she gives in. The forbidden dance is danced and the consequences will eventually meet their maker. That is the gist of Babygirl for the viewer who cares not for the motions of internal drive but for good-looking people hooking up when they are not supposed to.
Why does Romy risk her career and family for Samuel, who we find as a typical bro-raucous and sometimes-uncertain kid? It’s not the mess that she seeks to inadvertently upend her life, but it’s certainly her hands and heart that make it. Director and writer Halina Reijn knows exactly the kind of person Romy is, including the very fundamental idea to center the movie around her, whether it’s the forgiving, emotional framing of Romy’s first orgasm or the fact that we have no idea who Samuel, the designated manic penis dream boy, is outside of what she needs from him. It begins and ends with Romy, and that’s what it should be.
It’s hard not to rattle the connections between Romy’s latent discovery of proclivities to Nicole Kidman’s spanning career of sexual deviance and damnation. When honored at this year’s AFI Achievement Awards, Kidman was flanked with a film still of the last scene in Eyes Wide Shut hanging from the ceiling as she gives her acceptance speech. The still is of her right before she utters the infamous last line that still induces shivers for me; in other mouths or descriptions of the scene, it’d seem corny. Similarly, Babygirl could perhaps be done by other actresses, but by Kidman’s recent depictions of older women with a certain mood and role — the exasperated mother, the clutching-cardigan-by-the-ocean housewife— she feels like it clicks right in where Babygirl is needed. Some of the dialogue’s one-offs, where Romy may tell Samuel to shut the fuck up or shyly passes off a compliment towards her appearance, are supplemental to Romy’s self-clashes. At one point in the movie, she is sobbing her confession in a (nonsexual) self-flagellating bout: “I feel like there is this bad thing inside of me.” She is also the same woman who is known to have told her interviewers to fuck off in a post-graduation. But Babygirl is not about undercutting a woman who is in a high position by wanting to be degraded. It’s about the loss of opportunity as life moves on, where the window of exploratory desires gets slimmer as other parts of our identities become more formed and settled.
This is of course no claim to Kidman’s actual personal life (though seeing Keith Urban’s haircut surpass five presidencies is a forever curiosity), but for someone to reverse the knowledge of satisfactory sex after shaping sexuality on screen for years is quite the feat. Romy is both the high-powered woman and the vulnerable seeker, and Babygirl asks if it is a contradictory existence to have, or if there is a chance to find an answer. Of course, the power dynamic is bad optics and no one feels like she and Samuel should be endgame. One might consider gender-reversing the roles to see if this would garner the same attention, but when has a man not known what an orgasm is? It wouldn’t be Babygirl then.
Hollywood status moves in a funny direction. Sometimes the youngest stars burn out the fastest, while others get a chance at a career redemption. Kidman, however, has always been around. She most likely has not known the feeling of unemployment in a long time, and from her willingness to do whatever it takes to get the scene, she’ll do it. If the script asks to run into a EDM rave with extras who were most likely born after Eyes Wide Shut, she is out there getting sweaty. If the white boy of the month (this time, complimentary) asks her to lap milk at his feet, she is bent at the knee. If one has to defend the performance and significance of Babygirl to women who share conflicting values as they get older, I’ll stand here and hold the torch. Because wherever movies are going, Kidman is going, too.
Babygirl
2024
dir. Halina Reijn
114 min.
Opens Wednesday, 12/25 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre, Somerville Theatre, and theaters everywhere
