It’s been 25 years since Nicole Kidman starred in Stanley Kubrick’s erotic classic Eyes Wide Shut opposite her then husband, Tom Cruise.
Although the Oscar-winner has evaded sexually explicit roles in recent years, she is making a comeback to the genre by playing the lead in one of the most risque feature films to premiere at the Venice film festival this year.
Babygirl, directed by the Dutch film-maker Halina Reijn, stars Kidman as a high-powered CEO who cheats on her husband (Antonio Banderas) with her much-younger intern (Harris Dickinson).
The film is one of a number of titles on this year’s Venice lineup guaranteed to set pulses racing – proving that after years of chastity, erotica is truly back.
“[Babygirl] is obviously about sex, it’s about desire, it’s about your inner thoughts, it’s about secrets, marriage, truth, power, consent,” Kidman said on Friday during a bawdy press conference where sex was the singular theme.
“This is one woman’s story, and I hope it’s a very liberating story. It’s told by a woman, through her gaze. That’s, to me, what made it so unique … and freeing.”
Kidman said working with Reijn was key to her feeling comfortable on set. “I knew she wasn’t going to exploit me. There was enormous caretaking by all of us, we were all very gentle with each other. It felt very authentic, protected and, at the same time, real.”
While the actor admitted she felt “exposed, vulnerable and frightened” at the prospect of the film’s release, she said she was proud to forge ahead with films that had “women at the helm.”
Banderas also paid tribute to Reijn’s bravery to “put on the screen things we always think”.
“In a way we are prisoners of our instincts, like animals,” he added. “There’s nothing democratic about nature. We didn’t ask to be born. We didn’t ask to be human. We are attached to what we are. And this is a woman who talks about that with incredible freedom. I’m proud to be part of that [at a time] when we’re all put in boxes.”
Babygirl marks a noticeable shift from the more puritanical releases of the past decade; a 2019 Playboy study found that only one in every 100 movies released in the 2010s included a sex scene, fewer than any decade since the 1960s.
“There are quite a lot of erotic films this year, which was unexpected,” said the festival director, Alberto Barbera. “In the last 20 years, it seemed like the representation of eroticism and sex on screen had almost disappeared. It was like a form of absurd self-censorship. But now it’s back.”
Barbera highlighted the many titles at Venice dealing with sexual relationships in contemporary times, from sadomasochism to gay and lesbian relationships.
Alongside Babygirl, they include Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, an adaptation of the William S Burroughs novel, which stars Daniel Craig as an American expat in Mexico who becomes infatuated with a younger man (Drew Starkey).
Another sexually explicit title is the Alfonso Cuarón-directed psychological thriller series Disclaimer starring Cate Blanchett. Then there is the Norwegian film-maker Dag Johan Haugerud’s film Love, and the Italian film-maker Giulia Louise Steigerwalt’s Diva Futura, about the Italian pornographer Riccardo Schicchi.
“I don’t like that eroticism has been confined to the porn industry, which as we know has become mass consumed,” Barbera said. “It’s good that film-makers are trying to talk about intimate and sexual relationships in a deep and artistic way again.”
While there has been an increasing number of titillating films in the past 18 months, from Poor Things to Saltburn and Love Lies Bleeding, as well as TV remakes of classics like Damage and Fatal Attraction, there is one thing that stands the modern erotic film apart: inclusivity. Whether it’s centring female pleasure, depictions of homoeroticism or kinks, erotic cinema has clearly evolved with society.
“If Babygirl was made 30 years ago a female protagonist engaging in illicit behaviour would doubtless be punished in some way,” Barbera said.
Reijn, who has previously worked alongside Basic Instinct director Paul Verhoeven, said she wanted to make a film in that space that focused on the “female gaze”.
She said one of the main reasons for making Babygirl was to address what she described as the “huge orgasm gap” between men and women.
Matthew Holroyd, founder of erotic publisher Baron Books, said there had been a “surge” in films encouraging diverse sexual expression. “They aren’t simply for stimulation, they are films that have meaning,” he said.
While commercial films have a tendency to depict “heteronormative ideology” in sex scenes, Holroyd added, audiences were finally seeing “more representation”.
It’s also widely accepted that the introduction of intimacy coordinators after the #MeToo movement has equipped actors with the confidence to take on such roles.
After reports of systemic abuse on film sets, including Bernardo Bertolucci’s 70s erotic drama Last Tango in Paris, studios and film-makers are prioritising actors’ safety.
Arielle Zadok, an intimacy coordinator and sexologist, said more sex is appearing in films because we now “have a pathway to co-creating the scenes with clarity, efficiency, authenticity and most importantly, informed consent.
“What I often hear from cast is how clear they were on what was happening, how comfortable they felt sharing their needs and boundaries with me, which meant they were able to go deep into their performance … This is a far cry from how things were done in the past – vague, uninformed and in the worst cases, coerced.”
Zadok reiterated that in addition to the way sex scenes are now produced, logistically, “we are also seeing more depictions of eroticism, arousal, female pleasure and different ways to experience sexuality, gender and relationship styles.
“Audiences have always wanted to see themselves on screen … and that includes the type of sex and pleasure they want to experience,” she said.
And while much has been made of this generation’s sex-negative “puriteens”, experts believe gen Z might just desire to see more progressive depictions of sex.
Mary Harrod, professor of French and screen studies at the University of Warwick, said: “It’s well known that young people are actually having less sex than the previous generation. It’s no surprise that, like any commodity in short supply, physical congress is currently an object of cultural fascination, including on screen.
“After life went online in the pandemic, which hit some younger people especially hard, people want to return to celebrating physical interactions including sex as a form of embodied connection – and, often, the down and dirtier the better.”