Though Nicole Kidman used to be one of cinema’s greatest risk-takers, in recent years, she’s become streaming TV’s safest bet. The 57-year-old star is now a fixture of beach-read limited series like “Big Little Lies” and “Nine Perfect Strangers,” “The Undoing” and “The Perfect Couple.” They’re widely watched and keep Kidman bankable, even if you might miss the actress who used to give her all to the auteurist likes of Jonathan Glazer, Yorgos Lanthimos and Lars von Trier.
That’s what makes “Babygirl” so bracing. This A24 film, which premiered Friday at the Venice Film Festival, is exactly what Kidman has shied away from in recent years, a daring indie that re-establishes her as one of our most fearless actresses. Everyone who’s watched this spiky, sexy film in Venice wants to talk about it, and it should start no end of delicious debate when A24 releases it in theaters this Christmas.
Written and directed by Halina Reijn, “Babygirl” opens on Kidman faking an orgasm. She’s playing Romy, a hard-charging chief executive who seems to have it all: success, two spirited daughters, and a handsome husband (Antonio Banderas) who dotes on her by day and makes tender love to her at night. But is that the kind of sex she really wants? As soon as her husband finishes and falls asleep, Romy darts into another room, pulls up some S&M porn on her laptop and brings herself to a real climax.
Though her tech company innovates in the field of automation, Romy yearns to break free of her own smoothly running routine. That’s why she’s so intrigued by the office intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson), who often makes demands of her — some vaguely flirtatious — when their power differential is supposed to be the other way around. They first meet outside their office building when a rapt Romy watches him soothe a wild dog just by talking to it, though he’ll later claim that he simply fed the mutt a cookie.
“Do you always have cookies on you?” she asks him.
They lock eyes and he teases her: “Yeah, you want one?”
It isn’t long before Romy is stuffing Samuel’s tie in her mouth and lapping milk off a saucer when he orders her to, though the abandon that ought to distinguish their S&M affair is only offered in fits and starts. Romy is too wracked with guilt to fully commit to their wild acts, not simply because she’s stepping out on her husband but because she can’t reconcile the power dynamic of her fantasies with the bows-to-no-one role model she’s publicly considered to be.
Though Kidman has made sexually explicit films like “Eyes Wide Shut,” she still considered the intimate scenes in “Babygirl” a step further than what she’s used to, telling Vanity Fair, “This is something you do and hide in your home videos.” At the Venice news conference for the film on Friday afternoon, she said the thought of presenting it to audiences terrified her.
“I hope my hand’s not shaking!” she told the journalists in the room. “This definitely leaves me exposed and vulnerable and frightened.”
She credited Reijn with coaxing her toward a performance that could be considered naked in every way. “I knew she wasn’t going to exploit me,” Kidman said. The Dutch director (“Bodies Bodies Bodies”) said the real question of the movie is about reconciliation: Can a person love all of her layers, even the ones she’s ashamed of?
“All beings have a beast living inside,” Reijn said. “For women, we have not gotten a lot of space yet to explore this behavior.”
The British actor Dickinson, who is best known for “Triangle of Sadness” but is sure to see a surge of interest after “Babygirl” is released, said of the film’s sadomasochism sequences: “It’s always nerve-racking constructing a scene anyway, but you had something intimate to it and it’s very vulnerable.”
Still, Reijn insisted that sex scenes can be necessary and illuminating if done right, which is why she opens “Babygirl” with a faked orgasm and includes several different real ones as the movie goes on. “The huge orgasm gap still exists. Take note, men!” she said. Looking down the dais, she excused her male lead: “Not you, Harris.”
He leaned into the microphone and delivered a thought that could double as the film’s thesis: “Everyone deserves a good orgasm.”
Read More: Nicole Kidman Bares Everything in the Sexy Drama ‘Babygirl’
