Written and directed by Halina Reijn, the basis of the film came from a conversation she had with her friend about a woman, who over 25-year marriage, had never experienced an orgasm with her husband. Simultaneously awed yet unsurprised, a storyline started to form in the mind of filmmaker Halina.
Starring Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas, and Sophie Wilde, Babygirl depicts the life of Romy, a high-powered, polished, and tightly wound CEO who risks her career and family when she enters into a torrid affair with her intern, and thus begins a messy downward spiral.
Halina decided the woman for the job was Nicole Kidman; after all, she’s familiar the genre and themes after starring in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut—of which there are parallels—and there’s charted chemistry with British actor Harris.
On first view, the put together entrepreneur Romy is living her best life with a loving husband (played by Banderas), a successful business in a male-dominated industry, a flash condo in New York City (cue American Psycho vibes), and a house in the country; she’s built her own world from scratch where she lives by a tight schedule as mapped by her assistant Esme (Sophie Wilde).
She seems to have it together—too together—and Halina drop cues for the viewer to interpret: “I thought you were raised by soldiers or robots,” says Esme, cold and detached, it seems that she’s never truly found pleasure in her long-term marriage either, and needs to find a release.
A release that comes in the form of the young, seductive Samuel, who we first see on the streets taking control of a wild dog—a symbol of Romy’s untamed desires—and her interest was piqued immediately. The lingering glances across the room and the voyeuristic camera shots add to the intensity between the two, and relationship escalates quickly, as he frees her from her cage of suppressed desire, and a hot affair ensures.
The cat-and-mouse set up sees her try to remain in control but the power is constantly and thrillingly shifting (talking of cats, milk anyone?). This style harks back to the sexual thrillers of the ‘90s, Halina remembers, “Those movies, when I saw them, they were like, ‘Oh, actually, it’s not so crazy, all these things that are going on in my head!’” she says. “These movies are super dear to me, but of course they are almost all directed by men, all written by men.”
It’s true that the genre is a male-dominated lineage, from Adrian Lyne’s 9½ Weeks to Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, the filmmaker says, “I really decided in the beginning, I want to make a sexual film, just as sexual as all these films that I’ve always admired so much, but now I’m going to do it completely through female eyes. What does that mean and what does that look like?”
In Reijn’s world, the genre’s deliberate goading of sexual behaviours is bitingly fun, an erotic thriller for an age where everything is permitted, but the American prim moral impulses still run deep, and Romy struggles with her feelings of shame. And as Halina alludes, at the heart of the film is an act of self-acceptance for its protagonist.
“My question was about self-love. Mainly, how do I love all parts of myself?” Reijn says. This line of thinking was inspired by Verhoeven, who directed Reijn, an actress before she became a filmmaker, in a major supporting role in Black Book. “Paul Verhoeven always told me I could only make a movie if I had a specific question. For this story I wondered: Are we animals or are we civilised? Can we make peace with the animal inside of us? Is it possible for the different parts of ourselves to co-exist and, in turn, for us to love our whole selves without shame?”
For all the power and control she exerts in most areas of her life, Romy wants, on some level, to feel powerless and out of control when it comes to sex—she embarks on a new world of dominance vs subservience. In the CEO/intern dynamic, Samuel tells Romy, “I think I have power over you. Because I could make one call, and you could lose everything. Does that turn you on when I say that?” and yes it does.
Through the female gaze, it’s a new experience for Kidman, she says, “I’ve made many sexual films, but this is different.” Offering a female-centric approach, she continues, “Doing this subject matter in the hands of the woman that wrote the script, that’s directing it and is a really great actress herself—we became one in a weird way, which I’d never had with a director before. When you’re working with a woman on this subject matter, you can share everything with each other.”
Romy finds it difficult to balance the dualities of her desire and her civilised exterior; the accomplished executive and the matriarch; the controller and the controlled. We don’t know much of her background, but we do learn that she had an unconventional childhood, living in communes and cults, and that she was “named by a guru,” and Samuel, hungry for sexual power also seems to have experienced a troubling past. “They’re both damaged and both healing with each other, but in a very different way,” Kidman says. “And society would go, that’s not how you heal. But for me, the film is very provocative, yet it’s not unkind. I don’t think it’s judgmental.”
Reijn’s film not only provokes the viewer into questioning sexuality, gender, and desire, but also the modern narrative of these things in a changing landscape (and fresh from the backdrop of the #MeToo movement). As Romy and Samuel explore sexual fantasies, laying them out bare, bending the rules, and the boundaries of their dalliance, the film confronts our culture’s age-old tale of power and sex—only to flip it all on its back, upside down, and on all fours.
