In 1999, Nicole Kidman plays the wife of a doctor who is exploring his sexuality and power in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. 25 years later, it’s Kidman’s turn to explore this dangerous world in Halina Reijn’s Babygirl.
Babygirl chronicles the self-destructive character arc of Romy (Nicole Kidman), a female CEO who engages in an affair with her new intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson). Through their fragile relationship, Romy falls into a pit of fear for the destruction of her career, marriage, and reputation. From the first scene featuring Samuel to the very last, Babygirl is shot from the framework of Romy’s world, where we see her meetings, her conversations, and her relations with other characters as power dynamics.
But as it is implied in the poster slogan of this film (“Get Exactly What You Want”), Babygirl is painting the boundaries and issues with pleasure and consent (though what Romy actually wants vs. what the audience wants to see will be different). Through the film’s depiction of fetishes and sexuality, the film blurs the line of consent, where audiences begin to question what Romy and Samuel want from each other as they bathe themselves in a cycle of humiliation and satisfaction. Even in the more intimate scenes between Romy and her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas), Romy is unable to communicate the sexual frustration she faces throughout her character arc. The other key idea that Reijn is making is how sexuality is seen across different generations. Romy is able to have a more intimate and meaningful relationship with Jacob but is unable to get the pleasure and needs that Samuel provides. And furthermore, it asks the question of how people’s views on desire change across generations.
As important as these discussions are to the core of Babygirl, Reijn struggles to balance these two ideas out in screentime. The film overstays its welcome, and the pacing is inconsistent. The progression in the relationship between Romy and Samuel speeds past the first impressions and throws audiences into the little games of power that the two engage in that take up a majority of the screentime featuring the two. The final act also begins to falter, and it is also where Reijn starts to seriously struggle as a storyteller, finding an ending that nicely ties up the themes in sacrifice of any emotional investments the audience made up to that point. Simply put, it doesn’t give the audiences anything to feel or grapple with after the film.
It should come out as unsurprising for people familiar with Kidman’s acting skills that what she delivers in this film is great. Though she may not be able to compete with some of the other actresses for this year’s Academy Awards, Kidman does not disappoint, and neither did Banderas and Dickinson as of that matter. The performances were so well done to the point that it’s disappointing that the film’s pacing and complexity fail to complement this pivotal aspect.
Babygirl is quite entertaining and unintentionally funny, but seeing it through a more critical viewpoint, the film offers very little complexity into the topic of sexuality and consent that few films explore and deserves more attention towards for younger generations of audiences to understand. Decent film, short of being great.
3.5/5 Stars
For Your Information: The iconic Nicole Kidman AMC commercial (“We Come To This Place for Magic”) does not play before this movie starts. If anything, this would’ve been one of the funniest ideas ever.