What to Watch
- January Streaming Guide
- Winter TV Shows
- ‘The Last Showgirl’
- ‘American Primeval’
- ‘A Complete Unknown’
- ‘Babygirl’
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Nicole Kidman bares body and some soul in a story about a married woman who enters a dominant-submissive affair with a younger man.
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‘Babygirl’ | Anatomy of a Scene
The writer and director Halina Reijn narrates a sequence from her film, featuring Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson.
Hi, everyone. My name is Halina Reijn and I am the writer-director of “Babygirl.” So the story of this movie is about a woman who seems to have it all: beautiful family, wonderful husband and an amazing job. She runs her own company in robotics. Yet she is attracted to her male intern, very forbidden relationship — “Oh, you’re here.” — who is going to dominate her, sexually. And this is their first long encounter in a hotel room. And she’s all alone in there waiting for him. She’s totally dressed up. And then he comes in underdressed, wearing a hoodie with some little plastic bag from some bodega. And the first thing he says is, “Oh, you’re here.” So he’s not even impressed by the fact that she is there. “It’s ... What you’re doing is wrong.” Of course, that is also a power play. This whole movie is about power, control, surrender. And this scene particularly is very much about the power dynamics between our main characters. And what is very important to me in this scene is that the scene is a performance in a performance. The whole movie is about performing. The whole movie is about theater. It starts with a fake orgasm. It ends with a real orgasm. So we’re continuously asking the audience what is real and what is fake. And is it possible to become our authentic selves. And what does that mean exactly. “I don’t really know how to. What do you want from me? Because you show up here. You don’t know me. I’m a stranger dressed like this. You expect me to just look at you and not do anything?” For this scene specifically, we really asked the actors to show that they are performing. “Get on your knees.” “No, what?” “Get on your knees now.” “I’m, no!” So they are constantly going in and out of their character. And you can see Harris Dickinson, who plays this young intern. He’s really experimenting with what is masculinity. Who am I allowed to be as a man in a day and age of consent. What am I allowed to do. How can I stay respectful but yet also dominate this woman, which he obviously asks for. “I think I have power over you because I could make one call and you lose everything.” And yet we see this woman who has so much power and especially over this intern, but she chooses to be degraded by him. And, to me, why am I doing this? Why am I telling this story? It’s because I feel that total freedom and an actual liberation means that we should connect to our inner, animalistic side. The moment we start to suppress the beast and we say, no, I don’t have a beast, I’m going to do Botox. I’m going to sit in ice baths. I’m going to sit in oxygen chambers and do all the therapy that I can think of to create this perfect image of my identity, and then everybody will love me. That’s, of course, a mistake. “No, I don’t like that. Not like that, not like that, I don’t like that. I don’t want it like that. My movie is a cautionary tale of what happens when you deny that you have a darker side within you. Stop! Open your eyes, please
By Manohla Dargis
- Babygirl
- Directed by Halina Reijn
- Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller
- R
- 1h 54m
“Babygirl” isn’t a romantic comedy or a romance or even a comedy, though it concerns matters of the heart, and has a friskily impolite sense of humor. Set over what seems like a very long Christmas season, it centers on Romy — a transfixing Nicole Kidman — a married woman who enters a dominant-submissive affair that almost consumes her. It’s a story about women, bodies and the regulation of both, and what it means when a woman surrenders her most secret self. All of which is to say, it’s also about power, but with kinks.
Romy is the chief executive of a slick, growing robotics company that, from its videos, seems to provide warehouse automation. Presumably, the robots moving goods around will eventually make human labor redundant; in the meantime, they serve as a hard-working metaphor for a woman who’s rationalized every aspect of her existence. At her New York apartment, she dresses for another high-flying workday but then slips on a frowzy apron as she packs her children’s lunches with handwritten notes. (The lack of hired help is an off detail.) The apron seems so incongruent with her job and the frictionless perfection of her domestic realm that her puzzled husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), asks about it.
The writer-director Halina Reijn (“Bodies Bodies Bodies”) is just as scrupulously attentive to detail as Romy. With sensitivity to the gilded surfaces of Romy’s life, and with a series of brisk, narratively condensed scenes, the filmmaker sketches in a woman who presents an aspirational ideal, from her glossy lipstick to her teetering heels. Yet while the ceiling-to-floor windows of Romy’s importantly situated office announce that she’s a contemporary woman with nothing to hide, you know better: By the time Romy first breezes into work, you have already watched her sprint naked from her postcoital bed — where Jacob is sleeping the deep, contented sleep of the satiated — so she can secretly masturbate to online pornography.
The movie’s opener is a grabber — the first shot in the movie is a close-up of Romy seemingly on the orgasmic verge — and not only because Kidman bares her lovely, apple-cheeked rear as her character bolts down the hall. From the moment that the actress’s backside and coltish legs are gliding through the hushed darkness of Romy’s tastefully luxurious apartment, the movie seems to be invoking Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 erotic drama “Eyes Wide Shut.” In that hallucinatory film, which also opens at Christmas time, Kidman plays a married woman who sends her husband (Tom Cruise) spiraling after she tells him about her unconsummated desire for another man. “I was ready to give up everything,” she says.
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