Idon’t know if anyone else is going to call Babygirl, directed by Dutch actor Halina Reijn, a feel-good movie. But, boy, it made me feel good.
It’s the story of a powerful, married, middle-aged CEO and mother, Rory (Nicole Kidman), who chooses to act out her secret sadomasochistic sexual fantasies with Samuel (Harris Dickenson), a young stud—who happens to be her intern. In other words, our heroine is a bad, bad babygirl. You moralists will be glad to know she doesn’t get away scot-free with her transgressions. She suffers from deep emotional conflict and the real threat of losing everything dear to her.
But huzzah! She doesn’t die. In fact the movie ends with an intimate close-up of a satisfied smile, and it is post-coital, and it is hers.
This, I believe, is a small triumph of modern cinema.
Think of the outcome of other movies about women bold enough to risk going for what they want, whether in their appearance, their sexual desires, or their career. Most recently, The Substance, widely touted as a tongue-in-cheek feminist narrative mocking the debilitating limits of Hollywood beauty culture, kills off its heroine (Demi Moore) in the most gruesome, punishing way. (More of what I have to say about that here.) Or how about the highly respected conductor (Cate Blanchett) in Tar who slowly loses her mind before she is reduced, for her various misappropriations, to conducting a humiliating ragtag orchestra of cosplayers?
As we watch Samuel insinuate himself in increasingly intrusive ways into Rory’s life, it becomes clear that he’s a predator, which fits in nicely with Rory’s submissive fantasies. The guy is hot, and pretty weird, manifesting various clues to the potential ramifications of his dark sexual power: He wears a gold necklace, for one thing, which makes him look kind of “street” under his corporate suit. More alarming, on his ripped flank he sports a tattoo of a black-hooded angel, seeming to be wielding a rifle (rather than the traditional bow-and-arrow). In various hotel rooms, Rory submits to his demands to stand in the corner facing the wall, get on all fours, lap up milk from a saucer on the floor, which—is it just me?—seems kind of tame in the BDSM world. But for Rory, used to being the Bossgirl, it represents a loss of power she finds irresistibly arousing. Whenever things get really steamy between them, the camera is almost always on Rory’s face, portrait-like, so that whatever Samuel is doing to her is a background blur. (To act convincingly like you’re having a volcanic orgasm while there’s a camera intently focused on your face, I mean, could you do that? I think Kidman deserves an Oscar for those scenes alone.)
I wanted to avoid commenting on Kidman’s face, and focus only on her acting, but my editor did ask me about a moment she’d seen in the trailer, where Rory seems to be in a dermatologist’s chair. Yes, there is a brief scene in the movie where Kidman’s character is being injected with either filler or neurotoxin; afterwards, one of her daughters mocks her for having “trout lips.” I do think it’s brave of Kidman to allow her face to be meticulously examined in the many close-ups in Babygirl; she’s showing her age (57) and the effects of whatever fiddling she’s succumbed to, which manifests in a kind of waxiness and in an overly plump upper lip verging—cinema verite?—on the trout lip situation. Does she still have the range of motion in her face that allows her to express deep, uncontrolled feeling? I’d say it doesn’t matter—because she’s exquisitely capable of conveying that. I don’t know how she does it; maybe it’s one of the qualities of a great actress?
And as for that deep, uncontrolled feeling, the sexual desire. How refreshing it is to watch a middle-aged, likely post-menopausal woman still animated by lust. Especially when we’ve been inundated by warnings, incessant and unnerving, about peri-and postmenopausal angst and physical decay. Rory’s passion belies those messages: Not dead yet!
Ashamed of her desires to be sexually dominated, Rory hasn’t ever revealed them to her lovely, doting husband (Antonio Banderas). She has tried, awkwardly, to get him to act them out. But without context, her husband quite understandably can’t get into making love to her with, for example, a pillow over her head (“I feel silly!” he tells her). And so—unbeknownst to him—he’s never satisfied her.
Once Rory’s affair is no longer a personal or professional secret, she could easily have become a victim like other, less fortunate heroines. There is a scene, in fact, in her country house swimming pool, that seems to portend a drowning.
But the co-worker who’s learned the truth is too admiring of Rory to take her down, and urges in a tense conversation that Rory just do her f*cking job, because there are so few other female CEOs and women in power like her, which trumps her mistake. This minor character in the film is the real angel, another woman recognizing Rory’s critical role and offering her a second chance. Rory, older—and now wiser—grabs it.
Source : https://www.allure.com/story/nicole-kidman-babygirl
