Baby girl
Verdict: A sexy post #MeToo thriller
One of the oddities of these post-#MeToo years in Hollywood is that Lolita-esque stories of older men falling for much younger women, or even schoolgirls, have all but disappeared — while the opposite dynamic has suddenly become all the rage.
Barely a month goes by without an older woman sleeping with a man 25 years her junior, as if to right a century of cinematic wrongs.
Anyway, hot on the heels of Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine hooking up in Amazon Prime’s The Idea of You and Nicole Kidman flirting with Zac Efron in Netflix’s A Family Affair, Kidman is back, involved on more than one level with 28-year-old British actor Harris Dickinson in the steamy psychosexual thriller Babygirl.
Here at the Venice Film Festival, air-conditioned theaters are currently offering a blessed respite from the warmer-than-normal weather. But last night’s world premiere of Babygirl brought a different kind of sizzle.
Nicole Kidman hits the red carpet for ‘Babygirl’ during the 81st Venice International Film Festival on August 30
Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson in a scene from ‘Babygirl’ due out in January
Antonio Banderas and Nicole Kidman in a scene from ‘Babygirl’
Kidman described it as her most “revealing” performance ever – which, considering 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut, is quite a claim.
She plays Romy, a successful businessman who runs a successful robotics company and replaces warehouse workers with automatons. She makes wise remarks to her staff, such as: ‘one-day delivery has raised the stakes considerably’.
At first glance, she is as serenely successful at home as she is at work. Her handsome theater director husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) seems only too happy to accommodate her rather intense sexual demands, and she to his. The family is completed by a pair of teenage daughters – not that Dutch writer-director Halina Reijn spends much time on their development. One of them is gay and the other likes to dance.
Yet Reijn has other things to attend to, and he tackles them with a remarkable urgency. Filmmakers sometimes begin their features with sound rather than image—a murmur of people chatting, perhaps, or a lonely dog barking in the street. Here, Romy is clearly in the grip of sexual ecstasy, though she has to watch online porn to get the job done. “Revealing,” indeed.
Later, on her way to work, Romy is struck by the sight of a young man calming a dangerous dog. The young man turns out to be Samuel (Dickinson), one of a new batch of interns from the company, who are ushered in to pay homage to Romy in her posh office. She immediately notices his good looks and his bravado, and soon discovers that she can’t resist him.
But Babygirl is not just a story of an illicit affair in the office, regardless of age. It is much more interestingly about power and politics in the workplace. Samuel senses that Romy, who tells others what to do, has a kinky desire to be the one who directly follows orders. So the CEO and the intern switch roles; the boss becomes the boss.
Kidman has described it as the most “revealing” performance she’s ever delivered – which, considering 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut, is quite a claim
It’s a smart, sexy film, brilliantly and daringly acted by Kidman and Dickinson, with top-notch support from Banderas, writes Brian Viner
That is far from the end of the affair. There are revelations and accusations, thwarted ambitions and hints that Romy’s sexual psychoses are somehow connected to a strange childhood spent in sects and communes.
There is also an ending that could not possibly happen if this were a relationship between a male boss and a woman much lower on the corporate ladder. 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.
Nevertheless, it’s a smart, sexy film, brilliantly and daringly acted by Kidman and Dickinson, with top-notch support from Banderas (who for most of his career was definitely not considered a cuckold).
As for the almost-unmentionable, the alleged cosmetic work that sometimes seems to have limited Kidman’s range of expression from A to about D, which is cleverly woven into the story. Romy is clearly the kind of woman who would make a friend of Botox.
Speaking of injections: for the rest of us here in Venice, after some mediocre previous films, Babygirl gave us just the adrenaline rush we needed.
Babygirl is coming out in January