Written and directed by Halina Reijn
The much-hyped “Babygirl” is a pig in a poke; an extended act of bad faith. Is it a sexist exploitation film? A parable about feminist power? A cautionary tale about manipulative men? It wants to be all these and in the end is none. The tone of the filmvis subdued, minimalist, yet for all that histrionic. Beautifully shot and sharply paced, it comes in at a brisk 114 minutes – which still feels too long, thanks to a rambling and static Act II. The director, Halina Reijn, has come up with a provocative premise but has failed to flesh it out in any but the most superficial terms.
“Babygirl” draws a distinct line between a woman being able to get what she wants in bed and her ability to be a leader in business but the connection is not only tenuous in dramatic terms, it’s contrived. The film seems intended as a feminist parable about power exchanges and sex and is presented in what seems at first a naturalistic style but it’s true genre is fantasy as made clear by the exacting color schemes, meticulous production design, and shot choices, which often verge on portentous art cinema trying to produce an out of place and unearned suspense.
As Romy, the gladiatorial Nicole Kidman looks like a carven wax imago of herself, an AI double. Except for her neck and the backs of her hands, her face and naked body are eerily devoid of signs of aging. Her eyes have a permanently startled look, wide open indeed, from Botox or some other treatment. The film contains a striking scene where she undergoes an elaborate beauty regimen that looks like a fountain of youth treatment undergone as self-mortification. There’s a ghoulish aspect to this scene with its short, sharp cuts (the film is expertly edited and paced). Verging on horror, it conveys with visual wit the depressing rituals a woman in power must go through to present a perfectly manicured presence in the corporate boardroom.
Because movie stars are in an unforgiving business predicated on artificiality it’s churlish to harp on an aging female actor’s appearance, however plastic it may strike one. The face is an actor’s chief means of expression and the more beautiful the actor is the higher the stakes in preserving that face. In a way, Kidman’s very appearance, its highly artificial gloss, lends itself perfectly of the film’s theme of female insecurity and empowerment. Her face, framed in close up after close up registering pleasure, anxiety, puzzlement, etc., is the running subtext of “Babygirl.”
All the same, Kidman just looks weird.
Her orgasms, both faked and real, are the crux of the film, its key f/x, as it were, as well as the whole reason for the film’s being (you can imagine the pitch meeting). They are real tour de forces, shot in ferocious unwavering close up – a hymn to the male gaze? Or a celebration of women’s liberatory sexual expression? Somehow they fail to add up to more than the sum of their parts. I found myself drifting off, even texting a friend that she needed to see it even though it was garbage. There’s a carelessness to the film’s dramatic logic, which is a mash up of thrillers, mawkish family drama, and bogus journey of self-discovery. It has nothing of substance to say about any of these themes beyond cliché and platitude, serving them up like adverts for posh lifestyles.
But what to say of Kidman herself? Since “To Die For” and “Moulin Rouge” she has turned in some truly powerful risk-taking performances. In her later years she’s turned into an impressive, if restless, acting mill, as if afraid to pause. Many of the choices she’s made have struck me as mediocre though they’ve proven very popular. But she’s always been for me an actor more to be admired than loved, unlike say her compatriot Cate Blanchett. Her commitment to the material, her intensity, and her tremendous grace and sheer presence has stature and substance. Nonetheless, there’s always something slightly too calculated about a Kidman performance, including this one. Naomi Fry, in The New Yorker, nails it: in a movie about a hot mess Kidman is just not messy enough.
Antonio Banderas is marooned in a thankless role, an emasculated, impotent figure completely immersed in his work as a theater director, while the young hunk, Samuel (Harris Dickinson), who fulfills Kidman’s fantasies of submission, is a complete blank. He reminds me of swaggering dumb fucks I knew in LA, all hair gel and wary preening, totally clueless. More a projection of Romy’s fantasies than a real person, he has no apparent interior life, but comes off as improbably wise and confident beyond his years, running his lines with an air of someone who can hardly be bothered. It’s a labored performance. A mere intern, he’s lent an air of dangerous and disruptive charisma. His habit of challenging Kidman’s perfectly sensible objections and rebuttals with a dull-witted question is meant to both underscore his privilege and unsettle hers. Romy seems baffled by this resistance. Are we meant to think she finds this behavior attractive? Or does the director imagine she’s critiquing male arrogance? This kind of ambiguity is supposed to play ironically but it only reveals an impoverished failure to imagine three-dimensional characters. Except this is not a naturalistic drama. More a warped passion play where characters play Large Emotions or Ideas.
Kidman’s longing for humiliation is depicted as both shameful and vaguely spiritual, and finally, as a way for her to own her own power (which never seemed in doubt from the first act). There’s a tedious subplot about her self-aggrandizing aide Esme’s scheme to undermine Kidman by blackmailing her into putting her money where he mouth is by acting as a real leader and supporter of women. This is all red herring dumb show, played for an irony so mild it’s totally ineffectual.
The scene with Esme is shot in tight CU, facing the camera (and reading a speech to a camera); a repetition of a similar scene of Romy’s in Act 1. Not once does the film show us the real dynamics of office politics, the boardroom struggles, meetings and decisions, etc. We never see Kidman doing something that looks like actual work other than tapping her phone and making bland statements for streaming to the company or its clients about her “vision.”
“Babygirl” closes with two scenes: Romy triumphantly telling a fellow (male) exec to fuck off. Romy, prone on her bed, her husband diligently fingering her to orgasm, just the way she likes it. So maybe this is a film afterall about how a career woman can really have it all?
