Verdict: A sexy, post #MeToo thriller
One of the oddities of these post #MeToo years in Hollywood is that Lolita-style stories about older men falling for much younger women or even schoolgirls have practically disappeared – while the opposite dynamic is suddenly all the rage.
Hardly a month seems to pass without an older woman bedding a chap 25 years her junior, as if to right a century of cinematic wrongs.
Anyway, hot on the high heels of Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine getting it together in The Idea of You on Amazon Prime, and Nicole Kidman cavorting with Zac Efron in A Family Affair on Netflix, along comes Kidman again, entangled in more ways than one with 28-year-old British actor Harris Dickinson in the steamy psychosexual thriller Babygirl.
Here at the Venice Film Festival, air-conditioned cinemas are currently offering a blessed relief from hotter-than-usual weather. But last night’s world premiere of Babygirl brought a different kind of sizzle.
Nicole Kidman attends a red carpet for ‘Babygirl’ during the 81st Venice International Film Festival on August 30
Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson in a scene from ‘Babygirl’ which will be released in January
Babygirl is not just the story of an illicit office affair across the age divide. Far more interestingly, it is about power and workplace politics.
Kidman has described it as the most ‘exposing’ performance she has ever given – which, considering 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut, is quite a claim.
She plays Romy, a corporate hotshot who runs a thriving robotics company replacing warehouse staff with automatons, and making wise observations to her workforce such as ‘one-day shipping has dramatically upped the ante’.
On the face of it she is as serenely successful at home as she is at work. Her dishy theatre director husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) seems only too delighted to cater to her somewhat vigorous sexual demands, and she to his. The family unit is completed by a couple of teenage daughters – not that Dutch writer-director Halina Reijn spends much time developing them. One of them is gay and the other likes dancing.
Still, Reijn has other matters to attend to, and gets down to them with arresting urgency. Filmmakers sometimes start their features with sound rather than pictures – a hubbub of people chatting, perhaps, or a lone dog barking in the street. Here, it’s Romy evidently in the throes of sexual ecstasy, although she needs to look at online porn to finish the job. ‘Exposing’ indeed.
Later, on her way to work, Romy is struck by the sight of a young man calming a dangerous dog. The young man turns out to be Samuel (Dickinson), one of a new batch of company interns, who are duly ushered in to pay homage to Romy in her swanky office. She instantly clocks his good looks and his swagger, and soon enough she finds that she cannot resist him.
But Babygirl is not just the story of an illicit office affair across the age divide. Far more interestingly, it is about power and workplace politics. Samuel senses that Romy, whose job is telling others what to do, has a kinky yearning to be the one jumping to orders. So the CEO and the intern switch roles; the boss becomes the bossed.
Kidman has described it as the most ‘exposing’ performance she has ever given – which, considering 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut, is quite a claim
It is a smart, sexy film, brilliantly and boldly acted by Kidman and Dickinson, with first-class support from Banderas
That is far from the end of the affair. There are revelations and recriminations, ambitions thwarted, and hints that Romy’s sexual psychoses are somehow connected with a strange childhood spent in cults and communes.
There is also an ending that couldn’t possibly happen if this were a relationship between a male head honcho and a woman much lower on the corporate ladder. However, at the same time, I wonder if Heijn is being quite as counterintuitive as she thinks: this is still, for the most part, a story in which the man holds the cards.
Nevertheless, it is a smart, sexy film, brilliantly and boldly acted by Kidman and Dickinson, with first-class support from Banderas (who has spent most of his career being absolutely nobody’s idea of a cuckold).
As for the almost-unmentionable, the alleged cosmetic work that sometimes seems to have limited Kidman’s range of expressions from A only to about D, that is cleverly woven into the narrative. Romy is clearly the kind of woman who would make a friend of Botox.
On the subject of injections, for the rest of us here in Venice, after some so-so early films, Babygirl has given us just the shot of adrenaline we required.
Babygirl comes out in January