Apart from Jude Law making his daring escape from the law by hopping on a treadmill, my main memory of Ivo van Hove's staging of Obsession (2017) is that of Halina Reijn, as Giovanna, scattering rubbish all over the set. Now, working as a writer-director, Reijn scatters rubbish over global cinema culture and benefits from the A24 hype machine in doing so. Babygirl isn't quite as awful as Reijn's previous film, the exploitative Gen-Z-meets-Agatha-Christie Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), but it's nearly as juvenile and just about as smug.
Focusing on the affair between the CEO of an NYC robotics firm (Nicole Kidman) and the intern (Harris Dickinson) who instantly diagnoses the well-heeled boss's unfulfilled desire to be dominated, Babygirl evidently considers itself a brave, transgressive entertainment, and some of Reijn's statements about it have been wonderfully pompous: "Babygirl was an opportunity to bring my Dutch, more liberated ideas about sexuality to the US... I thought of Americana as a metaphor for the danger of suppression that still exists within me."
These are big claims, since the end result is weirdly tame in its imagery and mightily confused in its sexual politics, ticking off contemporary platitudes about modish topics - consent, the orgasm gap - with all the depth of the average Cosmo article. What the modern woman really, really wants, Babygirl ultimately suggests, is to have Antonio Banderas and Harris Dickinson fighting over her. Well... aim high, I guess.
It's billed as an erotic thriller, and Reijn has confessed to a fondness for the likes of Basic Instinct (1992), while indicating that her take is far more progressive: "We are in conversation with [film] history...but we're going to to do it in a different way." In part she succeeds, since Babygirl has precious little of the drive or dramatic impetus of a thriller; all of its tension and interest are in the (fairly promising) early scenes. On the plus side, Reijn and her collaborators have clearly thought the film out in visual terms - right down to the pink cellphone case brandished by Kidman's Romy - and the opening sequences craftily juxtapose corporate sterility and churning horniness thanks to Matthew Hannam's brisk editing.
Though some moments (the first motel room tryst and a witless illicit-encounters montage) just make you feel embarassed for her, Kidman, looking fetching in Kurt and Bart's power-dress designs, is an asset in the role, too. Compensating for the script's deficiencies, she uses the close-ups to convey Romy's conflicted, unsettled feelings, and gives the in-control CEO a disarming wobbly walk that also suggests her vulnerabilities. A strainingly meta 'Botox moment' is a little much, but Kidman finds ways to bring some tenderness to Romy's struggle to integrate her competing selves, and to the relationship dynamic, notably in a quiet post-coital scene.
As Samuel, Dickinson has his moments - especially, his laugh after he instructs Romy to "Get on your knees!", not entirely convinced by the part he's allocated himself in this relation. But his sexual savant role is so thinly conceived that we never get a read on the character's motivations. It's not the actor's fault that his sex appeal here has also been crazily overhyped (not only by 'the Internet' but by professional critics), including a sub-Claire Denis shirtless sway to George Michael's "Father Figure": an on-the-nose song choice, if ever there was one.
Babygirl falls apart as its underwritten character's start confronting each other, and Samuel's abrupt banishment from the film just feels like a plot convenience. As the cuckolded theatre director husband, who's never once sexually satisfied his wife in 20 years of marriage, poor Antonio Banderas fares far worse, especially in a late confession scene that finds him mewling "What the fuck, Romy...?" in a tone that made me weep with laughter.
The only sequence I'd save from the second half is a vibrant wordless one: Romy tracking Samuel down in a club. But indulging a campy pop aesthetic is clearly only part of the film's intention; on the contrary, given some painfully heavy-handed references, I think it's actually aiming for Ibsenesque intensity. Unfortunately, while we might buy Banderas's Jacob directing Hedda Gabler, we definitely don't swallow such touches as the couple's younger daughter being called Nora and having a fondness for dancing - you guessed - the Tarantella.
Babygirl's thinness is especially evident in this last section, including a hasty reconciliation scene and the sudden wheeling on of a subsidiary male character for Romy to give a sound scolding to for the sake of a very cheap feminist huzzah. And maybe Reijn needs to watch Basic Instinct again, and more closely. Not only is Verhoeven's film more fun and more accomplished in its storytelling than Babygirl, it's finally more subversive, too. Suggesting that Sharon Stone's Catherine Tramell was "punished" for "dark desires" is not being "in conversation with film history": it's conveniently rewriting it.
Babygirl is in cinemas now.
