Baby girl
Verdict: A sexy post #MeToo thriller
One of the oddities of these post-#MeToo years in Hollywood is that Lolita-style stories about older men falling in love with much younger women or even schoolgirls have all but disappeared, while the opposite dynamic is suddenly in vogue.
Barely a month goes by without an older woman sleeping with a man 25 years her junior, as if to make up for a century of cinematic mistakes.
Anyway, hot on the heels of Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine in The Idea of You on Amazon Prime, and Nicole Kidman cavorting with Zac Efron in A Family Affair on Netflix, comes Kidman again, entangled in more ways than one with 28-year-old British actor Harris Dickinson in the gripping psychosexual thriller Babygirl.
At the Venice Film Festival, air-conditioned cinemas offered relief from the more intense than usual heat, but last night’s world premiere of Babygirl brought with it a different kind of excitement.
Nicole Kidman attends a red carpet for ‘Babygirl’ during the 81st Venice International Film Festival on August 30
Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson in a scene from ‘Babygirl’ to be released in January
Antonio Banderas and Nicole Kidman in a scene from ‘Babygirl’
Kidman has described it as the most “expository” performance she has ever given, which, given 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut, is quite a statement.
She plays Romy, a corporate star who runs a thriving robotics company that replaces warehouse staff with robots and makes sage observations to her workforce like that “one-day shipping has dramatically upped the ante.”
She is apparently as successful at home as she is at work. Her attractive husband, theatre director Jacob (Antonio Banderas), seems only too happy to satisfy her vigorous sexual demands, and she his. The family unit is rounded out by a pair of teenage daughters, though Dutch screenwriter and director Halina Reijn doesn’t spend much time developing them. One is gay, the other likes to dance.
Reijn has other matters to attend to, though, and gets to work with surprising urgency. Sometimes filmmakers begin their films with sound rather than images: a bustle of people chatting, perhaps, or a lonely dog barking in the street. Here, Romy is evidently in the throes of sexual ecstasy, though she needs to watch online pornography to finish the job. A real eye-opener.
Later, on her way to work, Romy is shocked to see a young man calming down a dangerous dog. The young man turns out to be Samuel (Dickinson), one of the company’s new interns, who are brought to pay homage to Romy in her posh office. She immediately notices his good looks and swagger, and soon finds that she can’t resist him.
But Babygirl isn’t just the story of an illicit office relationship between people of different ages. Far more interestingly, it’s about power and politics in the workplace. Samuel senses that Romy, whose job is to tell others what to do, has a perverse desire to be the one who rushes to follow orders. So the CEO and the intern swap roles; the boss becomes the boss.
Kidman has described it as the most “expository” performance she’s ever given, which, given 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut, is quite a statement.
It’s a smart and sexy film, brilliantly and boldly acted by Kidman and Dickinson, with first-rate support from Banderas, writes Brian Viner.
But the story doesn’t end there. There are revelations and recriminations, frustrated ambitions and hints that Romy’s sexual psychoses are somehow related to a strange childhood spent in cults and communes.
There is also an ending that couldn’t possibly happen if this were a relationship between a man in a managerial position and a woman who is much lower in the corporate hierarchy. At the same time, though, I wonder if Heijn is being as counterintuitive as she thinks: this is still, for the most part, a story in which the man holds the cards.
It is, however, a smart and sexy film, brilliantly and boldly acted by Kidman and Dickinson, with first-rate support from Banderas (who has spent most of his career being the cuckold absolutely no one imagines).
As for the almost unmentionable, the supposed cosmetic work that sometimes seems to have limited Kidman’s range of expressions from A to D, that is cleverly woven into the narrative. Romy is clearly the kind of woman who would make friends with Botox.
On the subject of injections, for the rest of us here in Venice, after some mediocre first films, Babygirl has given us just the adrenaline rush we needed.
Babygirl is coming out in January
