Tell Me What You Want
By Michael Koresky
Babygirl
Dir. Halina Reijn, U.S., A24
Two clichés often trotted out in reviews of movies about primarily sexual relationships are “raw” and “sleek.” While the former infers something real and unfiltered and the latter glossy and accessible, a critic wouldn’t be off-base in using both as shorthand for writer-director Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, which foregrounds a “sleek” atmosphere of metropolitan privilege in depicting in “raw” detail a woman’s midlife sexual reawakening. Romy (Nicole Kidman), accomplished fifty-something CEO of a New York–based company on the vanguard of warehouse automation, finds herself unaccountably drawn to cocky millennial intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson). The two engage in an affair, which is also a battle of wills, resulting in extended sequences of physical and emotional penetration set amidst glass-enclosed offices, Manhattan hotel rooms, and an elegantly appointed Long Island country house. Sex becomes an eruption, a blast of fervid red against cool blue—as though wealth inherently conceals passion until it can’t hide anymore.
Babygirl may be more about control—who purports to have it, who craves it, who wants to relinquish it—than it is about sex, but Reijn is unmistakably interested in the physical. The film is ostentatiously heralded by grunting, which fills the soundtrack as the film opens, followed by a disorienting overhead shot of Romy in bed with her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas). He’s attentive and intimate and says he loves her while they fuck, but despite this—or probably, because of it—she subsequently disappears down the hall of their cavernous apartment, opens a laptop and watches domination porn to finish herself off. In case we didn’t grasp the thematic necessity of this opening gesture, the film’s title arrives with a smash cut.
What lingered for me here was less the self-certifying boldness of Reijn and Kidman’s representation of solitary female gratification than the unavoidable objectification the camera naturally confers upon the masturbator, and how watching masturbation on-screen, real or simulated, cannot capture the masturbator’s own subjective experience of pleasure. Whether or not eroticism indeed exists only in the eye of the beholder, this cold open colored my overall viewing of Babygirl, which centers a middle-aged woman’s perspective as she opens herself up to new, emotionally complex, sensory enjoyments, framing those explorations as risky social and professional transgressions. Whatever delights the film offers are of the generic variety, teasing at thriller and melodrama conventions while constantly pulling back to the realm of the purely psychological, a tense negotiation of the raw and the sleek as unresolved and tentative as its central adulterous couple’s stabs at kink.
Romy and Samuel initially wrestle for control of their situation; she tries to put the younger subordinate in his “place,” and he responds by doing the same to her. “I think you like to be told what to do,” he ventures. The film’s response to his brash retort is mostly a standard devolution into a triangle of jealousy, betrayal, and suspicion, peppered with discussions about consent and power amusingly reflective of the characters’ exposure to mandatory videos on work safety, efficiency, and harassment.
What works about Babygirl, titled after an infantilizing nickname Samuel spontaneously gives to Romy, exists in the awkward space between these two people, trying to negotiate the unspoken—and often unspeakable—new roles they are assigning one another. What doesn’t work stems in part from the rigid archetyping within which S&M relationships are often portrayed in fiction, namely the dime-store psychoanalysis of the strong, powerful businesswoman who secretly wants to be dominated. This results in scenes that can register less as shock than schlock, such as when Romy is instructed to crawl catlike across the floor and lick milk out of a saucer, evoking Madonna in her 1989 video for “Express Yourself.” The retro callback might be intentional—later, Samuel will dance, sinuous and shirtless, to George Michael’s breathy 1987 chestnut “Father Figure,” with its smack-dab apt lyrics—but it also unavoidably situates the film in an odd nether space between seriousness and camp. Reijn has said that she was inspired by the erotic thrillers of the eighties and nineties, films that, with the exception of 1987 cultural juggernaut Fatal Attraction, were not given much in the way of critical respect at the time but which have, in recent years, been re-estimated and perhaps overvalued by new generations of film lovers raised on a diet of largely sexless mainstream cinema. Everything old is new again.
Babygirl appears to echo those earlier films, though ultimately demonstrating an assiduous avoidance of the genre’s markers: a late film tussle between Samuel and Jacob declines to devolve into an Unfaithful revenge killing; the film doesn’t punish Romy for her business acumen and sexual assertiveness, à la Disclosure; Samuel’s playful power games aren’t established for some final reveal of psychosis and social aberration as with William Baldwin’s tech-voyeur in Sliver. Sex isn’t wielded for retaliation or payback; it blossoms with desire and experimentation—these are two people with different emotional and generational needs. The film is marked by a commitment to naturalism, and Reijn’s personal connection to the material is evident in her modeling the character of Romy’s director husband Jacob on Belgian theater provocateur Ivo van Hove; Reijn acted in van Hove’s troupe for decades, and his “so real it’s unreal” video-screen stage gimmicks are directly referenced here, as though some kind of in-your-face guiding light. Meanwhile, the bare-all truth-telling of Kidman’s performance extends from long-take orgasm simulation to scenes of Romy getting Botoxed and suffering the insults of her own kid, an uber-assured queer who says she looks like a “dead fish.”
Kidman responds to these challenges with unsurprising aplomb, holding the film together with her reliable arsenal of contradictions: confidence and neurosis, indomitability and coquettishness. She and Banderas display a comfortable domestic rapport, a couple of middle-aged actors tremendously at ease with each other and their own bodies even in sex scenes that telegraph their increasing estrangement. In comparison to Banderas’s weathered professionalism, Dickinson’s neophyte intern, whose eerie sense of composure both reflects and belies his youth, is appealingly unreadable. Wearing his trash-bag of a winter coat and smoking cigarettes at the office Christmas party, he doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks—a gorgeous hallucination of a bad boy who you just know will evaporate back into the ether as quickly as he appeared. There’s an implausibility to his guileless aggressiveness with Romy and his lack of intimidation by her professional bona fides, yet Reijn effectively fashions him as an unreal, emotionally ambivalent fantasy figure without explicit mommy issues, leaving the psychoanalyzing to reside elsewhere.
If only the film surrounding this trio of instinctive performers didn’t so often err on the side of over-explanation and goofy equivalencies. Glimpsed by Romy, Samuel is introduced taming a wild dog on the streets of New York (with a cookie, it’s later revealed), a sequence whose tee-hee foreshadowing might have been simply amusing and on-the-nose if it wasn’t so inanely staged. The depiction of Romy as a fearsome leader never rises above the corporate jargon she is reduced to, allowing Reijn to take canned jabs at capitalist facelessness; we’re told she’s a “strategy expert” and that “investor appetite is huge” for her factory robots enacting automated, repetitive tasks to decrease “labor shortages.” Bloodlessly matter of fact, the film’s mild flirtation with questions of artificial versus emotional intelligence seems meant to provide an analog to Romy’s pursuit of fleshly desire, but the underbaked schematic nature of these moments occasionally make the screenplay itself seem machine-tooled.
Babygirl is at its best when it leans into its characters’ guilt over sexual improprieties, presumed or real. Early in the film, while trying to get frisky in bed, Romy dares to tell Jacob she wants to watch porn together, covering her head with the bed sheet to thwart the embarrassment she feels in asking. Later, she will tearfully confess to him that she wants to be “normal,” after admitting her sexual needs and transgressions. Once her desires are revealed through the catharsis of her affair with Samuel, Romy can overcome the social stigma placed upon women’s erotic appetites; after all, wanting to be bossed around in the bedroom is hardly unusual. Babygirl doesn’t judge Romy for her kinks, and that’s its greatest quality. It’s refreshing for a sex-focused drama to offer an optimistic conclusion. Yet confirming Romy as essentially unremarkable in her tastes is a double-edged sword, at least dramatically. The ultimate turn-on is, you guessed it, respectful, consensual, and nuptial hanky-panky—all the better when experienced in the bedroom of your sleek Manhattan penthouse duplex.