Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl” resolves to correct the mistakes of previous films about women in BDSM-oriented relationships. Unlike “50 Shades of Grey,” its heroine Romy (Nicole Kidman), is the partner with far more power outside the bedroom. She’s a CEO who founded and owns a business that appears similar to Amazon. It opens and closes with scenes of her orgasms. Reijn strives to film Kidman without objectifying her. “Babygirl” focuses on her face during sex, with the rest of the body out of focus. The first scene carefully frames her so that her breasts can’t be seen. She’s only seen nude from the rear. It also de-emphasizes the penis, having Kidman achieve sexual pleasure only when men finger her. For American culture, that’s a sharp departure from the status quo. Even so, it doesn’t do enough to distinguish itself from earlier films about similar relationships, while it suffers from a surplus of good intentions and reluctance to take chances.
The orgasm that kicks off “Babygirl” turns out to be fake. Romy’s husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas), a theater director, has never been able to satisfy her sexually. In order to please herself, Romy crawls away to the comfort of her laptop, where she watches porn playing out her favorite fantasy: women submitting to men.
A new intern at her company, Samuel (Harris Dickinson, who played a closeted gay teenager in Eliza Hittman’s “Beach Rats”) is introduced, saving Romy from a charging dog. Samuel is obviously attracted to her, and it quickly becomes mutual. Once he becomes a part of her life, they embark on an affair, in which he orders her around and even tells her to act like a dog. Yet he’s careful to bring her to orgasm. The more Samuel becomes a part of Romy’s life, the riskier their relationship gets. When he shows up unannounced at her house and talks with her children, she worries that he may be a stalker.
Reijn lines Romy’s exploration up alongside those of her daughter Isabel (Esther McGregor). A queer teen rocking a mullet, Isabel has a steady girlfriend, but cheats on her with a neighboring girl in a poolside tryst. When Romy sees her daughter up in the middle of the night, smoking a cigarette, one flashes back to Samuel’s nicotine habit (and the similarity between the two characters’ ages). Other characters come in second to Romy’s story. This is fine for Jacob and Samuel, but becomes more troubling with her assistant Esme (Sophie Wilde). Throughout, the office is filled with BIPOC individuals who work for Romy’s company but play little role in the story. Despite a few jabs at corporate doublespeak about vulnerability and female empowerment, Esme’s put in place to move the plot forward by threatening her boss with blackmail. When Esme says that “I thought a woman would behave better than this,” she’s speaking more about Romy’s actions towards other women in the workplace than her sex life, but her subplot does little to flesh out these experiences. A scene at a rave hints that Romy enjoys flirting with women, but that’s the furthest it goes.
“Babygirl” flirts with clichés from films like “Fatal Attraction,” but turns them in a more sex-positive, woman-friendly direction. (Haijn acted in “Basic Instinct” director Paul Verhoeven’s “Black Book” and cites him as an inspiration.) An expectation that a woman will be punished for acts like adultery and BDSM goes deep, and “Babygirl” wants to do away with that moralism. To that extent, it’s commendable, but removing danger from the erotic thriller also depletes its heat.
Although “Babygirl” revolves around the shifting nature of power between Samuel and Romy, it jumps almost immediately to their love life. (Were it to go into more detail about Romy’s life as a CEO who’s succeeded on such a large scale, she’d be less sympathetic — does anyone want to watch a film about Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk’s sexual dissatisfaction?) Dickinson neutralizes the creepier behavior Samuel engages in with a performance that defines him by an inward innocence. He’s realistically awkward about sex, turned on by dominating women without being sure how to communicate with them. His surface arrogance is tissue-thin, a device to please Romy. Some of the film’s best scenes explore this dynamic, but too often, the dialogue sounds like a series of talking points about consent and BDSM. Arguing with Samuel, Jacob says women’s enjoyment of masochism is just a male fantasy. This attitude has kept Romy from telling what she really wants.
Over the last year, Todd Haynes’ “May December” and Catherine Breillat’s “Last Summer” have tackled troubling sexual relationships with a degree of provocation. That spirit’s missing from “Babygirl.” Granted, the context is much different: Samuel is an adult, with no familial entanglements with Romy. The film is so keen to reassure the spectator that Romy will be alright that it seems “pleased with itself, so thrilled with its own daring,” as critic Xan Brooks wrote. The knottier aspects of their affair, in which she’s turned on by the possibility of ruining her life, are cast aside so that she can live out her fantasies without real risk. It chokes on an excess of good taste.
“Babygirl” | Directed by Halina Reijn | A24 | Opens Dec. 25th citywide
