This is the first installment of a new series I’m dubbing “Late to the Movies”, where I give very strong opinions on movies that were released six weeks ago, and are probably no longer in the theater where you are. It’s just the kind of SEO-optimized content you’d expect from me.
I saw Babygirl in an upstairs “moviehouse” at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline.
It was a dense little room; only a few rows with a few seats each, much closer to a home theater than a cinema.
Sitting in my own small seat, I felt a bit like the cuckoo bird talked about in the film; one who rolled into a neighbor’s nest as an egg and was raised as a well- disguised guest. I tried to react to the film in the way the yuppie couples sitting around me did. I was a sophisticate among sophisticates, trying to watch a sophisticated art house film with sophisticated poise.
But alas, nothing shatters an air of sophistication like being horned up out of your mind.
Babygirl, written and directed by Halina Reijn, is a sexual triumph.
The film runs through tantalizing extremes of arousal and repression, pulling you along in a cycle of excitement that rises and falls as viscerally as the one mapped by Masters and Johnson.
It’s not just a film about sex. We’ve all seen those, and despite Dakota Johnson’s best efforts, they’re never what we want them to be. There’s always something false about them, something overeager. It’s as if they were written by imaginative virgins in need of a cold shower.
It’s the shock value rather than the primal allure of the act that pulls you into those films. They’re more sideshow than peepshow.
But Babygirl earns a rare honorific: it’s an erotic film.
Sex scenes in the movie are not bits of spectacle. They’re freed from both the intent to shock or the need to impress. They’re after something else; to show how sex as an expression of life (i.e. eros) reveals not just what we physically want, but who we psychically are.
The sex scenes in Babygirl are shown with very few cuts, the camera holding so steadily on the actors it’s impossible to remember they’re performing simulated acts.
In my screening, the audience was held in rapt silence for what felt like five minutes as Nicole Kidman, lying flat on her belly on a dirty hotel room floor, was brought to climax by Harris Dickinson, poised at attention, fingering her like an artisan, one knee on the floor, one hand up her skirt, as the levels of ecstasy, of arousal so crushing it’s scary, rose higher on her face.
She groaned a deep baritone groan from the gut. She rubbed her face and covered her eyes as if she’d scream.
No one in the theater breathed. We too were waiting to climax.
Like Last Tango in Paris and Eyes Wide Shut before it — though at greater ease with itself — Babygirl embraces the tragicomic absurdity of a sexuality reawakened and accepts the irrational logic of desire that guides all of us. Refreshingly, it does this by letting its characters play around with all of the senses in sex.
These characters are not watching themselves. There are no cameras rolling. They are, as Dickinson’s character Samuel says, playing; as uninhibited as children.
The film follows Romy Mathis (played to perfection by Nicole Kidman), a daughter of hippies turned tech She-EO on top of the new business world. This is a world where “toxic masculinity” has been rooted out, the thunderdome of commerce has been packed up, and fear and vulnerability are strengths.
In spite of her achievements and seamless domestic life, Romy is held to expectations as stifling as those placed on women in an earlier age. To her family — her daughters, the angsty teen Isabel (Esther McGregor) and the dancing tween Nora (Vaughan Reilly), and her Broadway director husband Jacob, (Antonio Banderas) — she gives no reproach.
When Isabel says she looks like a dead fish, she can do nothing but tell her to get changed for Christmas card photos. When Jacob fails to make her climax (once again, we’re to assume), she can do nothing but get on the floor, watch some porn, and finish the job herself.
Amidst her dissatisfaction, Romy’s impulse is to vanish under the bedsheets. Jacob, whose artistic life relies on probing characters and exposing states of mind, can’t make sense of this. You get the feeling that sex with him requires lots of eye-gazing, perhaps while he holds onto your head with both hands.
For Jacob, it’s all about deepening the connection, the union, between individuals. But Romy’s individuality is, to her, false. She doesn’t want it to be probed. She wants it burned up in the heat of passion. Romy seems attracted to all the things that outside the bedroom she might reject, which, depending on who you ask, makes an odd sort of sense.
The writer Carolyn Lovewell (Elliott) seems to think so in her New Age-y book Existential Kink, in which she offers a way of thinking about how conscious and unconscious desires shape our lives.
If desires act as our “fate”, Lovewell argues, determining how we’ll respond to circumstances and creating patterns of behavior, then desires are responsible for the bad parts of our lives as well as the good.
The deprivations, humiliations, and rejections we endure come, in some form, from desires to be deprived, humiliated, or rejected.
“Something needs to be at stake.” Romy says to Jacob, trying in vain to explain her needs.
In spite of herself, Romy wants to endanger everything she’s built. It turns her on.
Enter the Intern.
Samuel, played magnetically by Harris Dickinson, is the kind of self-assured twentysomething that could loosen a cork from a champagne bottle with the stroke of a knife, or hit a bullseye on his first throw at the dartboard. His finesse is unearned, instinctive, and would seemingly avail him anywhere.
Standing in his puffer jacket with a cigarette in his mouth (of course he smokes), his lingering eyes, pursed lips, his long, angular build, red hair and soft complexion ooze a rare sexuality; one that has no use for bravado, yet is seductively audacious. You can’t look away from Dickinson while he’s on screen.
In their comically overwrought first meeting on the sidewalk, Samuel saves Romy from the snapping jaws of a dog on the loose.
Later on in the office, Romy asks how he got the dog to calm down. Samuel says that he “gave it a cookie.”
“Do you always have cookies on you?” Romy asks.
“Why, do you want one?”
The comment barely registers on Samuel’s face. There is quiet focus, perhaps pleasure, in the sly movement of his mouth, but his eyes betray no self-satisfaction. He just wants to play.
The shape of the relationship that forms between Samuel and Romy surprised me in many ways, but most of all in its departure from formulas of the past. Reijn could easily have written a gender-bent Michael Douglas story of office infidelities, but that film would pale in comparison to Babygirl.
It’s true that the film sees lust as a means toward freedom, but what it says about sex goes beyond momentary scintillations, beyond the inverted thrill of letting your self-respecting self get overtaken in bed. It’s why I consider it an erotic rather than a smut film.
Babygirl is about hunger; about understanding your hunger, feeding it, and weaving past the voices of shame that try to bottle it up.
Reijn’s script, like Lovewell’s writing, sees hunger as a force that can shape your life without regard for politics or social obligations, especially if you ignore it.
“Female masochism is a male fantasy, a male construct.” says Jacob, the man who (if you can believe it) has just directed Hedda Gabbler.
To be fair to him, that statement is a diktat of the times. But like other diktats, it’s wrong.
Hunger doesn’t care about being a good feminist or a good wife or mother. Hunger wants to be fed. Now. And the more hungry you are, the more willing you are to say “fuck the consequences” and eat.
If you watch the film and wonder why would someone like Romy do all this? (a tough thing to ask if you’ve ever looked at Harris Dickinson), you won’t find a rational answer.
Romy does what she does because she likes it, and because the demands of sexuality are not frivolous.
Reijn understands this more than most filmmakers, and she accepts that if we want to be gratified, we need to face our sexual drives as they are, not as we’d wish them to be. That can mean, as it does for Romy, exploding whole parts of your life just to rebuild them in a way that’s meant to last.
But again, it’s impossible to reason this out.
Why would it follow that after nearly two hours of animal subjugation — of eating a cookie out of Samuel’s hand on all fours, of lapping up milk from a saucer on the floor, of becoming a “babygirl” — Romy would finally have the confidence to put a cocksure board member in his place? It doesn’t. And yet, it happens.
Why?
In her book, Lovewell writes about the shadow desires of our unconscious as something to be radically embraced and celebrated. She describes this using words like “orgasmic” and “liberating”.
At first, I couldn’t understand this. Why would it be freeing to accept that you crave humiliation? What’s liberating about wanting to be neglected and deprived?
The conclusion of the film gives some kind of answer.
Romy has brought the desire to destroy herself out into the light of day, and, in keeping with Lovewell, she’s blended it with her conscious desires for success and stability.
Clearly, not only has her professional poise changed, but her sexual roles have changed too. They’re more dynamic, more open, more playful.
That’s the secret to Lovewell’s solution, I think; not to compel our unconscious desires to cease, to ignore them until they burst like a swollen appendix, but to invite them out to play with us.
It’s a matter of opening up, of negotiating labels and the expectations they carry so that you can find out what feels good without actually destroying your life.
And luckily for Romy, after her affair with Samuel ends, she finds that Jacob, in time, is willing to play along with her (and consequently, he can bring her to climax).
Romy has fed her hunger. She’s accepted a desire at odds with all her other desires, and found the edges of herself in the process.
Helina Reijn, like most Europeans, is clear eyed about sex.
She knows that — no matter the rules, no matter the role you’re cast in, no matter the milk and cookies that get you there — sometimes you’re mommy and sometimes you’re baby. But whatever the case, you always gotta eat.
Fantastic article.
Incredible