Is Anyone Shocked By Babygirl?
Not since Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut has a female movie star offered such an awkward portrayal of sex as Nicole Kidman in Babygirl. The movie is meant to be daring, a Last Tango in Paris for our time, but its essential premise would work in a Douglas Sirk production: A sexually frustrated, long-married woman accepts her fate until a stranger comes to town and puts everything at risk.
What Kidman—as Romy, the CEO of a soulless corporation—dreams of and seeks out in online pornography is the experience of being sexually dominated. Not the most obscure of sexual fantasies, but for the movie to work we must understand this kind of sex as so shocking, so unnatural, that we are being given a privileged glimpse at something few decent people have seen before. What follows is a yoga class’s worth of heavy breathing (Romy’s) and a salute to the kind of soft-core porn that we haven’t seen much of in the past quarter century.
Romy’s life and world are sketched out in the first act in a way that makes her seem like an alien, but we are apparently meant to see her as an ideal. She’s married to the wonderful Jacob, a theater director who really respects her but who, for the 19 years of their solid, loving marriage, has never once brought her to sexual ecstasy. This might be believable except that, in the greatest bit of stunt casting of the past decade, he’s played by Antonio Banderas, who has been fulfilling sexual fantasies for more than 30 years. He manfully takes on the material and is good as the kind of sensitive and enlightened man who could never debase his wife in any way—this is Romy’s cross to bear. All of this—and her creepy home life, in which she makes a hot breakfast on weekdays and then puts “Mommy loves you” notes in her daughters’ backpacks before school, although one of the girls is a smoker who looks to be about 17—might as well have been presented as a series of storyboards, because no care has been taken to make any of these characters or their emotional and material circumstances remotely compelling.
Just when you think you might die of boredom, the oxygen masks drop and Harris Dickinson arrives in the role of Samuel, a member of the new class of interns at the company. He is the knight errant of the film, there to relieve both the audience’s tedium and Romy’s dry spell. His performance is so layered and interesting that you realize a great actor can rescue almost any script. Samuel is a chancer and a charmer, transparently uninterested in the intern life, his eye out for ways to subvert its structures. He quickly locates Romy as a means to a bit of fun. He stands too close to her, asks her personal questions, never acknowledges her as the most powerful person in the company, and soon figures out what she wants.
He manages to have a private meeting with her, and listens to her tell a story of entering corporate life. It was a “gruesome” process that involved solving “math formulas,” she says: “One of the questions was how many ping-pong balls would fit in that specific room.”
Girl bosses are going to girlboss, but math is always going to be hard. Samuel quickly calculates how many ping-pong balls would fit in the room they’re in, and she looks at him with new regard. Stay in school, girls!
Samuel’s boldness and command of Algebra I soon lead to their kissing, a passion born partly of his assertion that “I think you like to be told what to do,” and the affair begins. Don’t expect a frank accounting of what sexual domination and submission look like, because one of the more outrageous demands he makes of Romy is telling her to get on her hands and knees (apparently for some kind of … sex thing). After a considered pause, she assents, as though she’s Edmund Hillary boldly deciding to climb Mount Everest.
The movie turns on the idea that Sam has ultimate power over Romy because he could report what they’ve been doing to HR. “They could fire me,” she says, frightened. But his true power does not involve work politics. It lies in the fact that she’s become sexually dependent on him because he’s the first person to give her sexual pleasure in almost 20 years. There’s also a chance that his boldness and unpredictability might be signs not simply of his unsuitability for corporate life, but of something more sinister, even dangerous. He spends his free time skulking on the office’s balcony, wearing a giant jacket and smoking, a serpent among the ambitious interns. There’s a very good moment when we—and Romy—learn that he’s not just involved with her, but also with her assistant, which makes her wild with anger. Romy’s the CEO, but Samuel’s the boss.
Will this affair ever end? Or more to the point, will the movie? Yes and yes, for though its clear intention is to reveal that women in their 50s are full of sexual desires as various and urgent as those of the young, the film comes up with a 1950s-style answer to why Romy wants what she wants: a hinted-at childhood sexual trauma, the implication that her desires are problematic, and can be corrected if the trauma is healed.
The affair ends with the sensitive, cuckolded husband once again taking it in the shorts. Jacob confronts Samuel and they fight in front of Romy, but soon enough they’re sitting in the living room nursing their bruises with bags of frozen peas, which Mom has given them. Jacob is trying to explain that “female masochism is a male fantasy” to Samuel, but just as the gender theory heats up, he experiences a panic attack (never have we known him to be a victim of panic attacks but—to stand outside the moviegoing experience and inside the movie-writing experience—it must have worked in the room). The attack is resolved only when Samuel comes over, gently rubs his back, and talks him down while Romy sits on the couch near him. You think: threesome?
But it’s blessedly Act III, and things are starting to roll up. The panic attack prevents anyone from kicking off some age-gap discourse, and Romy quickly sorts out her problems, getting rid of Samuel by finding him a job at Kawasaki in Japan. (The rest of the interns have to stay in the claustrophobic office; Sam wins again.) If only she could dispatch her sexual impulses to Japan, too. What is to be done with her desires?
Early in the film, Romy tells her assistant that she was “named by a guru” and raised in many cults—“cults and communes”—and we see her undergo EMDR therapy in which meaningful images flash past her eyes. While tearfully confessing all to Jacob, she explains that she has tried therapy to kill the kink; nothing has worked. Successful girlbosses don’t want sexual domination! They want nice, normal sex, and through cleansing talks with a loving and patient husband, they can find it. What Romy has isn’t a kink; it’s a pathology, a pretty reactionary stance for the film to take, given its intention to shock us with the unthinkable.
By far the worst part of this terrible movie is the decision to give Romy a special sound to make when she’s having a real—instead of a fake—orgasm. This sound is a loud, growling grunt meant to suggest ecstasy but sounding more like the noises a character makes when he’s about to be transformed into a werewolf. In the final scene, Romy and Jacob are in bed together in a dreamy light, engaging in a healthy act of marital sexual congress. How can this ever be fulfilling to Romy, now that she’s discovered doggy style? Because a small accommodation has been made: As things heat up, Jacob very gently—as though he is shielding her from strong sunlight—places his hand over her closed eyes. Can this mild gesture toward her dangerous fantasies ever bring her the kind of pleasure she experienced with Sam? Apparently so: We are grunted out of the theater.