BABYGIRL (2024)

Thunder only happens when it’s rainin’, and Kidman’s only horny when she’s playin’. Who could forget the belly pain from her laughably deadpan four-letter word at the end of Eyes Wide Shut (1999)? Who could shake off that bitchy, bossy demeanour of hers, dressed in the classy gloss of Carole Lombard and Greta Garbo? And now that the femme fatale actresses of the 1980s and 1990s, from Sharon Stone and Nancy Allen to Glenn Close and Michelle Pfeiffer, have grown wrinkles and started making retirement plans, who could have thought that she’s only just getting into the game?

Halina Reijn’s latest erotic thriller, starring Nicole Kidman as an ageing CEO mother, Romy, feels every bit as sickly artificial as Kidman’s face full of cosmetics, powdered ashen; age can’t wither the quinquagenarian. It’s funny and revealing how The Substance (2024) seems as relevant a meta-comment on Kidman’s age as how Babygirl is on Demi Moore’s publicised love affairs. Like The Substance, the premise here alone, featuring a May-December office romance between Romy and her intern Samuel (28-year-old Harris Dickinson), is enough to excite the sex-deprived among the bourgeoisie. And I’m willing to bet that crumpled three-dollar bill in my back pocket that this began as Reijn’s Alice Harford fanfic, to be directed with Adrian Lyne and Paul Verhoeven’s voyeuristic glee.

Babygirl comes from a tradition of taboo and controversy that have clouded the films of Bernardo Bertolucci, David Lynch, Bertrand Blier (Going Places, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs), and Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl, Last Summer), as they did in the theatre for August Strindberg and Frank Wedekind, and in literature for D.H Lawrence, Jean Genet, and Vladimir Nabokov. Yet the film is incredibly devoid of that sense of danger in the forbidden fruit. Siding with her nemesis Pauline Kael, Molly Haskell famously defended Last Tango in Paris (1972) in From Reverence to Rape, by saying that accusing the picture as “male fantasy” would be:

[I]gnoring both the empirical fact that it is largely women, rather than men, who respond to the film, and the more subtle implication that our rearguard fantasies of rape, sadism, submission, liberation, and anonymous sex are as important a key to our emancipation, our self-understanding, as our more advanced and admirable efforts at self-definition.

Babygirl certainly has the right idea, but it has no, if you will, substance. Facing the darkly handsome Samuel, whose blank expressions have an unsettling air without any clear sign of predation, Kidman is swooning with oblique terror and surface vulnerability. The idea is how, being a respected woman of society, Romy loves, hates, and fears her own libido, manifesting in push-and-pulls between her id and superego, just like those between herself and Samuel. However, it hasn’t the drive and passion to invite us into Romy’s lust, and Kidman hasn’t the focus and intensity she brought to Eyes Wide Shut. It’s either that Reijn lacks the instinct for suspense, or she’s deliberately putting us at an emotional distance. It’s the same with The Substance: the characters seem neurotic alright, and we’re even told why, but we can’t feel it, much less sympathise with it.

Why exactly is Romy fearful of being turned on by a twentysomething? If it’s a matter of public perception, where’s the public? If it’s job security, where are her judgmental peers and gossipers? It can’t be her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) and their children either; they’re given so little to do that they’re barely characters we invest in. Even the age gap (of 30 years) wasn’t that apparent: with her make-up on, Romy could as well be in her late-thirties.

With acknowledged inspirations from the Lyne of Fatal Attraction (1987) and Indecent Proposal (1993), and her fellow Dutch Verhoeven of The Fourth Man (1983) and Basic Instinct (1992), you’d think that the movie would be at least as lushly transgressive and trashily sensual as the most frivolous of them. Yet it’s a sex thriller without much sex or thrills. The style of the corporate exteriors is sexless and inorganically polished, and it’s atmospherically airless, like The Substance. It might be deliberately that way. Sometimes a filmmaker can feel guilty over having “sex” at the heart of their work that they go out of their way to sift the excitement out of the sex and voyeurism, and moralise it with “redeeming artistic merit”: the “lesson” is that Romy is a stronger woman once she’s recognised and made peace with the “beast” within her, so she could climb up the Maslow’s hierarchy. It’s too self-conscious, and not willing to go where its instinct takes it.

It’s reported that movies now have “less sex than ever before.” It’s not quite true: movies before the 1960s have way less literal sex than what’s available now, and the sex scenes today, despite becoming rarer, are way more graphic than when they were more common. But it’s true in an unexpected but important way, that is, movies have less sensuality than ever before, and this movie is part of the reason why: you’re not worked up when Romy lets Samuel, who somehow understood that she fancies submitting to a male top and being treated like a dog, order her around on all fours, not because you don’t want to, but there’s just no way in.

John Huston’s movies can have no mention of sex, and yet his pictures have such masculine charge that they rival the most fantastically violent of Sam Peckinpah’s. The romantic comedies of Ernst Lubitsch and Howard Hawks, likewise, were what the couples went to for the pleasure they’d otherwise get when they masturbate because they’re so full of innuendos and double entendres sneaking under the Hays Code into the viewers’ tacit understanding. Here, the actors are apparently into it, but the camera doesn’t give us what they see and think (you have to project your own), and the movie has no situations or set-ups—the scattershot scenes just happen, and they don’t grow into each other.

We’re the extraterrestrials, studying that obscure object of desire for the school science project. We have some idea of what’s going down, and one by one the movie ticks off our bingo squares. As Samuel, Dickinson used his attractive blandness to poke at Romy’s facade of aloof self-assurance, and constantly test her boundary with threats of blackmail that would cost her her dear career—even the BDSM flicks with no proper set-up have more stakes because it’s a bourgeois’ notion of cat-and-mouse power play and unsafe pleasure, sanitised and eviscerated as it is for most mature viewers.

The ardour of sex in this is awfully Teutonic, and just about everything in it is symbolised. Romy’s two daughters—one rebellious and fashionable (Esther McGregor), the other traditional and simple (Vaughan Reilly)—are more of Romy’s two sides of herself than genuine characters with their own lives, stakes, and motives. The wild dog that Samuel tames in the beginning, supposedly with a cookie, is Romy’s uncontrollable urge for sexual gratification. One can go on. They’re doggerel trying for poetry and allegory, and they obscure valid plot holes. Does Samuel come with any ulterior motive? Maybe he wishes to gain favours at work? How was he able to gamble on Romy’s succumbing to her sex drive? How was he sure she was willing to play the role of a submissive stooge? Such questions do not matter, since Samuel is but a fantasy of a loveless hag-in-the-making.

With Jasper Wolf as the cinematographer, some sequences were audio-visually inspired, like that of Romy making her way through the crowd on the dancing floor to Samuel as the lights flash you into a seizure-inducing trance; it was the most exciting I felt all year save for Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers (2024) and Queer (2024). But it’s not consistent, as if Reijn shot it simply because she could, not that it contributes anything substantive to the characters’ dynamic.

As in Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), Reijn doesn’t seem very interested in emotional interiority. But in Bodies Bodies Bodies, though slight compared to Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), we giggled hopelessly and hysterically at the stupidity of the rich, spoiled kids. That emotional distance served to her advantage; and her cast, which included Rachel Sennott and Pete Davidson, had a spontaneity together we sometimes see in teen flicks like The Fallout (2021), and they knew how to play off each other.

The skits can become tired after a while there, but in Babygirl the humour doesn’t go off to begin with. When a black female assistant expressed her unwillingness to expose Romy with the same tiresome claptrap about “keeping women on top in positions of power”, Reijn doesn’t play up the absurdity of it (Romy craves for being powered over rather than having power), which also foreshadows the total misfire that was the girl-power ending, which says that a woman who has no life can regain her confidence once she overcomes her sexual dissatisfaction. Likewise, in the coffee and cookie scene, she doesn’t seem to know how to use Dickinson’s blankness for deadpan, or even camp.

On the other hand, this Piano Teacher (2001) and Elle (2016) rip-off doesn’t even begin to disturb you like it abjectly wants to. After the foreplays, which are played too safe anyway, we stroll along in montages of sex and play where there could’ve been spontaneous humour and natural connection. The sex isn’t drawn out, built upon, worked over, and played with, so it has no power or lustre. If that’s what you’re looking for, stay in bed and watch Pornhub.

NETHERLANDS • USA | 2024 | 114 MINUTES | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Halina Reijn.
starring: Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Sophie Wilde, Antonio Banderas, Esther McGregor, Vaughan Reilly & Gaite Jansen.