Image by Niko Tavernise and courtesy of A24
BABYGIRL– 4 STARS
LESSON #1: SEX WILL ALWAYS GET YOUR ATTENTION– Bear with a little casual language for a moment as we dip our toes into Babygirl together opening on Christmas Day. You gotta love a movie that opens pre-credits in the dark with only the unmistakable, frenzied sounds of coital climax permeating the theater. That’ll make you stop crunching popcorn, cut the casual chatter, and lock you into your seat. What if I told you Babygirl ends 114 minutes later with even more peals of people in the throes of passion? No matter if you’re picking up your jaw or clutching your pearls absorbing those libidinous groans, carnal instincts kick in and they doubtlessly arouse intrigue. You want to know where they are coming from and who’s making them.
The question for each Babygirl viewer becomes how long that captivation holds between those orgasmic bookends. Now, settle down, folks. Even though Halina Reijn’s film boasts an nervewracking electronically-tinged musical score by Cristobal Tapia De Veer amplified by an inserted chorus of huffing-and-puffing human voices and snarling animals sounds (take a listen to this track but with the earbuds in at work or in public), Babygirl is not wall-to-wall copulation. A labyrinth of conflict and kink awaits to push and pull the people of this story. Echoing something the great Muhammad Ali said in 1966, Babygirl personifies “different strokes for different folks.”
Granting an early answer to the opening intrigue, the first two people in the dark are the married couple Romy and Jacob Mathis, played by Academy Award winner Nicole Kidman and Academy Award nominee Antonio Banderas. They… ahem… are finishing, but whatever occurred before Babygirl opens was not sufficient for Romy. Hopping out of her husband’s bed, she retreats to another room and turns to online porn to gratify herself further and fully finish. Babygirl carrys over that semblance of a woman who doesn’t get enough into her professional life.
Romy Mathis is a high-ranking and powerful top exec of Tensile Automation, a warehouse logistics company currently specializing in inventions and solutions. Not only does she rule the roost of her Broadway office in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan as an emulated woman, the very successful Romy is also an on-camera spokesperson for the company. While she sharply conveys her expertise in walking in heels and nailing a pitch, Romy is still a bougie mom at home cooking with an apron for her theater director husband and two teenage daughters (High School’s Esther McGregor and Vaughan Reilly of last year’s The Hunger Games - The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the former of which owns slightly time-wasting secondary plot in Babygirl about teen heartbreak mirrored through her mother’s daliances).
Enter Samuel, one of a crop of new interns at Tensile Automation, played by Harris Dickinson– the tall English drink of water seen in Triangle of Sadness and The Iron Claw. When Samuel requests Romy to be his HR-assigned orientation mentor, the mutual fuck-me eyes of temptation emerge, where it’s a matter of who makes the first adulterous move. When willpowers and professional boundaries break, Babygirl unfurls a situation where kink meets kink and damn near animalistic urges explode.
LESSON #2: THE POWER OF REQUESTS– Much of Babygirl’s progression of this illicit affair that mixes work with pleasure written by Reijn surrounds the power granted by requests. In dynamite scenes of dialogue, characters are found asking for small things they want as a not-so-thinly-veiled means to make larger subsequent appeals. Some requests feed personal addictions or incite triggers of particularity. Others attempt to pump the brakes of refusal. Urging someone for simple pleasantries like a cup of coffee at the office, passing a lighter for a smoke, or holding open a door twists arms and escalates to how one wants to be be pleasured in the bedroom. Once that line is crossed, Babygirl is a battle of orders and the ordered. An inquiry of “what do you want” is forcibly answered by “I will do whatever you tell me to do,” without a safe word in sight.
The stalwart conduit for all of this lithe intensity is Nicole Kidman. The 57-year-old has always had the charismatic heat to melt the most leaden of hearts, but this role in Babygirl is vividly different than her being simply an object of desire or a woman who can get what she wants from a wink and a smile. With such eccentric fetishes involved– especially since none of this with Samuel is love, not even close– Kidman had to craft a persona that was convincingly both tortured and bottomless for how deep Romy’s behavior manifest from and will go.
Matching her, Harris Dickinson had to bring equally unbreakable strength. At no moment could his character’s own hot-blooded forcefulness waver into any plush affection across from the radiantly beautiful woman. Successfully, the actor maintains the necessary impure conviction and this movie’s nasty edge never dulls. Not to be undone, there is also a perilous ramp present in Babygirl for Antonio Banderas to intersect this tryst with more the basic reactions of an aghast cuckold. He too seizes the moment and gives one of his career-best performances.
LESSON #3: THERE IS NO WAY THIS ENDS WELL– Typically, there’s no way this dark tailspin ends well in Babygirl. In this corporate setting, secrets don’t last and workplace rules are decidedly broken, causing whistleblowing and blackmail to enter the fray. Past the office, someone is usually going to cave romantically or someone is going to break it off first before the other is ready. Calling back to the horny 1990s works of Paul Verhoeven, Joe Eszterhas, and their lesser cousins of late night cable “Skinemax” flicks, extreme and tragic consequences are usually the default answer. Because of those tropes and tendencies, waiting on pins and needles to find out and see those proverbial final straws can become the hook of the whole movie for viewers looking for either prudish comuppance or their own stimulated satiation.
It could have been very easy for Bodies Bodies Bodies writer-director Halina Reijn to paint herself into a problematic corner where an overflow of violence was the only way Babygirl could justifiably end. With great surprise and frankness-breaking humor, Reijn twists those old expectations to her advantage instead of decking them in the teeth. Her screenplay is cemented by the notion of trusted consent because Romy and Samuel are neither true heroes nor true villains to us or each other. Swerving from the norm, increased risk actually reduces fear in Babygirl between these two knotted characters, and that is a strikingly mature predicament to witness.
LOGO DESIGNED BY MEENTS ILLUSTRATED (#1250)
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