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19 hours ago
2
Cosy crime is one thing. Is this a cosy erotic thriller? An apparently super-transgressive exercise in workplace sub/dom role play but that is weirdly without any actual emotional or corporate consequence, without the menace that was supposed to make it so exciting. Writer-director Halina Reijn gives us what looks like, and in many ways is, a sex-positive reboot of the 90s high-concept erotic thriller. You might set it alongside Barry Levinson’s 1994 film Disclosure about sexual harassment with Michael Douglas and Demi Moore, the twist (or op-ed talking point) in that case being that it was the woman harassing the man.
Nicole Kidman plays Romy, an inspirational CEO of a hugely successful company in the big city specialising in fulfilment-centre automated delivery systems; she is married to Jacob (Antonio Banderas), a theatre director currently working on a production of Hedda Gabler, Ibsen’s play about an unhappy marriage, with trendy Ivo van Hove-type projections on screen. They have two teen daughters, one queer, one apparently straight. Romy and Jacob have a lot of sex, but she can only really climax by rushing off to another room straight afterwards and watching porn on her MacBook; Jacob doesn’t seem to wonder where she’s got to. Romy’s career is sailing along and, interestingly, she is absolutely upfront about the Botox she’s getting and endures with motherly exasperation jibes from her daughter about resembling a “dead fish”.
Romy’s comfortable world is rocked by meeting the glance of a hot, pert new intern called Samuel, played by Harris Dickinson; he impresses her by subduing a savage dog in the street that seemed about to attack Romy, but doing this so easily you might suspect some kind of scam cooked up with accomplices. With amazing insolence, and an expression of bovine incuriosity, Samuel comes on to her – his perv spidey-sense evidently picking up on her frustration and unhappiness – and makes it clear he’d like something to happen where he’s dominant and she’s submissive. Romy realises that being dominated by a young intern whose career and life she could crush at any moment is very exciting and the amour fou duly kicks off, with the gen Z dom awarding his boss the unfeminist endearment “babygirl”. As for Romy’s real-world power over him, Samuel hints at what might happened if he went to HR with what’s been going on.
But this is domination-lite. The supposed degradation is mostly signalled by the scuzziness of the hotels where they meet (she’s presumably paying); in one, Romy actually has to pick a hair off the counterpane: eeeuwww. She sits down and stands up and goes into the corner and faces the wall when he says so. She has to get down on all fours and lap milk from a bowl. They have straight sex. But really … that’s it. We don’t get into BDSM, we get nowhere near to needing a safe word. Babygirl is simply about age-gap and the reversal of gender power-relations. And a further line is crossed – though unsexually – in that time-honoured narrative device from the 90s Joe Eszterhas era when the secret lover shows up at the heroine’s family country home on various unlikely pretexts.
And so the film drifts along to a strangely implausible non-denouement with impermanent effects; she has all the backstory with work and family and he is weirdly blank in ways that don’t feel entirely intended. Romy’s ambitious assistant Esme, played by Sophie Wilde (from the Australian horror film Talk to Me) looks for a while as if she will provide the grit in the oyster but it is not really forthcoming, although any old-school ironised twist of culpability and shock might of course be coldly assessed for its implications in the online social-media discourse, which is what happened to Emerald Fennell’s much more interesting Promising Young Woman.
Kidman has previously played not dissimilar roles in upscale metropolitan locations, in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Jonathan Glazer’s Birth; there is nobody better at playing elegant and soignée and sophisticated. But she and Dickinson can’t deliver the erotic thrill of actual danger.
