Please don’t read this column if you don’t want light spoilers.
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We’re meant to be shocked by Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, but what I found shocking was not Nicole Kidman crawling on all fours in front of her much younger intern, played by Harris Dickinson. It was something different.
One of the craziest moments in this movie about one woman’s need to be dominated actually occurs when Kidman’s spurned husband confronts her young lover. The two men – after trying to beat each other up, of course – debate whether or not a woman wanting to be controlled in bed is a real desire, or a by-product of men’s general misreading of women.
It’s incredibly comical, but also relatable. Men are constantly trying to one up each other as far as declaring “what women really want.”
Reijn understands this; it’s part of the reason why the film works.
The “sex as liberation” narrative has gotten really stale at this point in history. Libertines will rail against the prudes, the prudes will rail against the libertines, and the older I get, the more I realize that it’s all been said before.
Which is why I actually liked the fact that Kidman’s character, Romy, is both liberated and trapped by her kinky affair. She doesn’t really get to have it both ways, because nobody does, and the people who insist that you can have it all are mostly likely holding on to dark secrets themselves.
The fact that any “girlboss” may be a little bit of a “babygirl” underneath is hinted at by Romy’s business attire – simple, pale layers hiding a silk chemise. Nicole Kidman may be a bombshell, but Romy is not. She’s a successful businesswoman, a mom, and a wife, and she is sexy in the tired way of women who work too much. Her intern simply reads her very well.
The film strongly suggests that the “empowered woman” cliché is how the corporate world masks reality, as the corporate office must be stripped of all that is tricky about us as human beings. Being “empowered” makes for a better story than the complicated reality of power dynamics at work. Thus empowerment is a mask that women wear, and that men enjoy seeing them wearing, for as long as it is useful to the enterprise.
Kidman’s character, Romy, is both liberated and trapped by her kinky affair
I empathize with Romy’s character because being an HBIC (Head Bitch In Charge) is exhausting, and because at some point, it doesn’t matter if your desires are influenced by your trauma (Romy grew up in cults and communes); sometimes, you just want what you want. The film takes a matter-of-fact approach to the conflict between Romy’s outward roles and innermost kinks; she just needs to get out of her head so she can enjoy sex, dammit. She needs to obey.
It’s probably not a coincidence that as a business leader, Romy is spearheading robotics and automation. Automation, after all, is just another form of letting go.
A lot of the classic movies about workplace affairs – Fatal Attraction comes to mind – strive for an overarching moral or present themselves as a sexy cautionary tale. Babygirl isn’t interested in all that.
Instead, it’s a movie about how human beings need sex, and how things can go sideways when they can’t express themselves in bed (or, uh, on the floor, or anywhere Romy and her intern get it on). For a beautifully shot movie that explores the tension between fantasy and reality, it’s also uncomplicated, which makes it more wholesome.
I know some critics believe that this movie was not sexy and transgressive enough, which is totally fine, but I’m not even sure Halina Reijn was trying to be transgressive. I think that she was going for intimate and emotionally honest, and I think she managed it very nicely.
The domineering intern isn’t supposed to be a prince charming, Romy’s husband is a darling good man, and Romy herself just needs to figure out how she can combine the parts of herself that are in conflict with each other so that she can breathe freely at last.
By the time Romy tells off a nosy male business partner, we can tell her character is finally being herself. After all, it’s no mystery as to what women want. We want to choose our own way.