Remember the scene in Eyes Wide Shut when Nicole Kidman confesses to Tom Cruise about the day she met a young sailor and found herself tempted to chuck it all and run off with him, kicking off a fit of jealousy that animates Cruise’s actions for the rest of the movie? Babygirl is what would’ve happened if she really had run off with that sailor.
Eyes Wide Shut marked its 25th anniversary a few months ago, and it says a lot about Nicole Kidman that she’s still making erotic sex films all these years later. Kidman is outstanding here. She’s been busy the last few years, in prestige movies like Being the Ricardos, playing Aquaman’s mom, and starring in an endless series of streaming miniseries, most of them also involving intrigue and infidelity. But this is her best performance in years.
It’s the return, after a few false starts, of the erotic thriller, one that masters both the “erotic” and “thriller” parts. Babygirl is structured similarly to those movies in the 1980s and 90s about Michael Douglas having affairs and suffering consequences, albeit with the genders reversed. As soon as I was done watching, I wanted to hear Karina Longworth do a two-hour podcast about it.
Directed by Halina Reijn, the Dutch actress-turned-director who last did Bodies Bodies Bodies, Babygirl is very invested in post-#MeToo workplace power dynamics. The notion that the two characters are having an affair, and while both have the power to end the other’s career, one of them has a lot more to lose than the other. The film approaches this with cynicism, in which it appears every character has an angle.
That’s Romy Mathis (Kidman), the high-powered CEO of a robotics/logistics company, and from what we see of their workplace culture and product presentations, the film has a keen eye for shallow corporate bullshit. Married to theater director Jacob (Antonio Banderas), along with two teenaged daughters, living in lush homes in the city and suburbs. Romy’s established as first having sex with her husband and then immediately going to another room to masturbate. In this, the film is less attuned—almost nobody who has kids in the house walks around naked like that.
Soon, Romy falls into an affair with Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a young intern at her company, and even though she’s the much more powerful of the two, he flips the script by executing power games. Dickinson—from Triangle of Sadness and The Iron Claw—delivers a wonderfully subtle performance that helps him escape the Generic Handsome Actor Zone. He sounds like kind of a dumb guy, but he’s calculating every step of the way.
These types of movies—as Longworth endlessly pointed out on her Erotic ‘90s podcast series—often safeguard the ideal of the nuclear family, which implicitly must be protected from the predations of the outside lover. I liked that Babygirl doesn’t really establish this, and lets us know, before the main affair, that one of the daughters is a budding female fuckboy herself. That daughter is played, with a prodigious mullet, by Esther McGregor—Ewan’s daughter. As for Banderas, as a handsome, heterosexual man who works as a theater director, he could likely clean up with the ladies should he desire, although the film doesn’t touch that thread.
Between the #MeToo theme, and the Girlboss element, this movie’s going to cause some discourse, even before we get to the question of whether there’s an intimacy coordinator involved. But that’s good, right?
