Nicole Kidman has never been timid about her acting choices. She has worked with directors who know how to push limits, notably Stanley Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut), Lars von Trier (Dogville), and Yorgos Lanthimos, The Killing of the Sacred Deer.
Kidman takes another risk in Babygirl, an erotic thriller about a highly successful woman who has spent most of her life suppressing her darker sexual desires (her description not mine).
Long before we meet her, Kidman's Romy has climbed to the top of the corporate ladder: She's the CEO of Tensile, a company that makes robots that replace human laborers in the nation's warehouses. She's won the trifecta of contemporary happiness: corporate power, a loving husband (Antonio Banderas), and two great daughters (Esther McGregor and Vaughan Reilly).
So where's the risk in what sounds like a showcase for affluence and achievement? Romy’s bedroom life has stagnated; she may dominate in the boardroom but she wants to be dominated in the bedroom.
We know that Romy is sexually unfulfilled because the movie begins with a prologue in which she has sex with her husband, whose tastes are ... well .... conventional. They finish. He falls asleep. She races to another room to masturbate while watching porn on her laptop. She muffles sounds of ecstasy, but what's sex without the danger of discovery?
Such is the beginning of a story that revolves around Romy's improbable affair with an obnoxiously confident intern (Harris Dickinson) at her company. Exposure could derail Romy's career, ruin her marriage, and alienate her daughters, precisely the sense of danger she needs to charge her psycho-sexual batteries.
Kidman captures Romy’s uneasiness about surrendering to Samuel's demands. She fights a battle with herself, unsure how far she wants to go with a brash young control freak.
And, yes, it's difficult to believe that a corporate leader would tolerate Samuel’s aggressively inappropriate office behavior.
Romy first notices Samuel when he calms a wild dog during a street encounter in front of Romy's office building. What better sexual partner than someone who knows how to control unruly animal impulses?
For his part, Dickenon's Samuel is happy to boss the boss around in scenes that include ordering a naked Romy to kneel on fall fours, lick milk from a saucer, and other things that you may not want to try at home.
While you're attempting to understand Romy, consider Samuel. What makes this guy tick? He talks about needing consent before proceeding in a sexual relationship with Romy, but he often comes across as a manipulative jerk. Maybe he exists only to trigger Romy's sexual revolution.
Dutch-born writer/director Halina Rejin gives her movie a high-gloss veneer that allows her to slide across issues of power, age difference, and the desires Romy has avoided, perhaps because she considers it unbecoming for a summa cum laude graduate of Yale with an impeccable resume.
For quite a while, Babygirl plays like a movie that may have drawn inspiration from predecessors such as Fatal Attraction, but Rejin charts a cause in which Romy must learn to accept herself, "dark" eroticism included. It may sound glib, but Babygirl's story arc might hinge on Romy's transition from faked orgasms to the real thing.
Put another way, the movie seems less interested in psychological depth than situational tension, putting Romy in a position some will see as more demeaning than liberating. The screenplay takes a sober turn in its third act, but, at least for me, Babygirl already had sacrificed too much credibility to dig its way out.
And for all its supposed daring, Babygirl can’t transcend a contrived, soft-core feel. Put another way, this isn't Last Tango in the Boardroom.
Rejin’s choice of jobs for Romy proves telling. Making her a CEO may have been influenced by the need to show her as a woman with power. Can an acclaimed executive wield power in the daytime while abandoning it at night? That might have been more intriguing had Rejin’s movie been less surface-oriented.
Initially, Romy meets Samuel in a hotel of his choosing; it’s too down-scale for her tastes. She may be willing to submit to his sexual orders. but damn if she doesn’t pick a better hotel for their future assignations. Perhaps one has limits, after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment