Gotta start the year off somewhere - Babygirl

Halina Reijn has a sure eye for unique characters and perhaps the wryest of wits. Bodies, Bodies, Bodies was pretty fun and a rip on privilege, class, social media, all wrapped up in a murder mystery. Babygirl interrogates sex and power wrapped up in a kind of dramedy. I agree with a number of people that there are resonances with Secretary and Kidman’s earlier turn in Eyes Wide Shut, but while those films were focused and more pointed, Babygirl doesn’t quite resonate with me.

Kidman’s Romy Mathis is by any measure, a remarkable woman; she heads a robotics company on the cutting edge, is obviously successful, has a beautiful family and discovers she has a kink. Maybe more than one, but the principle one that is front and center is her BDSM relationship with an intern, Samuel, that threatens everything. For awhile, there’s a genuine dramatic tension that sustains the film until it ceases to evolve into anything more interesting. 

Nicole Kidman does the heavy lifting and is ably abetted by Harris Dickinson in their pas de deux.There are elements of threat and genuine stakes. All Samuel has to do is make one call and it Romy’s life is trashed. There’s a lot to explore in a Dominant/Submissive relationship, particularly between the very powerful and those in their employ (Secretary did this much, much better and with greater verve and wit), but we’re left wondering just what does this relationship mean to Romy. 

She seems to enter it out of both boredom and curiosity. Her sex life with her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas, who frankly, I just can’t see not being sexy) is loving but unfulfilling. We start the film with them in bed and Romy faking an orgasm and heading out from the bedroom to log on to her laptop to get a real one. To Reijn’s credit, there’s no forced childhood memories but there is almost no reflection on Romy’s part. 

She tries to call the proceedings off after Samuel shows up unannounced at the house in a scene that should have been electric, but elicited little more than a shrug from me. Later, she throws a fit of jealousy when she forbids him to see her admin anymore. It comes out of nowhere; there is no sense of her having the kind of topping from the bottom dynamic that can sometimes characterize a situation like this. It reads as phony, frankly. 

Even when she comes clean to Jacob, nothing seems to have any genuine emotional underpinning. If anything, Jacob, upset and blindsided by Romy’s lying and the affair, is perfectly within his rights when he throws her out (after getting his ass handed to him by Samuel). You feel for him, sure, but Romy never gives a clue that she feels terribly guilty about her thing with Samuel. Here lies the rub; Kidman turns in a killer performance based on some of the thinnest material available. 

Reijn may well be making some statements about the need for the powerful to experiment with a release from their roles by exploring avenues of humiliation and submission (and orgasm; it’s obvious that Samuel gets Romy off while poor Jacob doesn’t); it’s possible she’s leveling the playing field by having the lead be an accomplished, influential woman (as opposed to the stereotypical man who dresses up in French maid uniforms to be humiliated by a dom). But what, precisely, she’s getting at is obscured for much of the film until a power play by Romy shows us that she’s embraced her sexuality and identity more clearly. 

My problem with that is that it comes too little too late. The film is populated by people who exist mostly as supports for a central character who is too ill-defined to read as enigmatic, even to herself. Even Samuel is given no inner life. How does he know what he knows? Romy keeps telling him how she doesn’t want to hurt him or take advantage of him because he’s so young, but it’s obvious he’s fine and these are lines she’s only feeding herself, but they just add to the superficial aspect of this whole enterprise. 

I was genuinely intrigued by the film’s premise and to see Kidman flex her acting muscles is always a joy, but I checked out repeatedly throughout the film because everything was at such a distance. I don’t need to like a character to enjoy a film, but I need a situation and/or characters I can be interested in. 

Watching this evoked memories of Eyes Wide Shut and how well Kubrick could draw you in with people who were barely more than cyphers. I couldn’t care less about Cruise’s character, but I was fascinated by the milieu in which he found himself and how he navigated it. Comparisons are odious and matching anyone against Kubrick is unfair and churlish, but I kept wondering what he would have done with this material.

There are grace notes here and there, as when Sophie Wilde as Romy’s admin Esme tells her she needs her to be the woman, the leader she is, and how the company needs more women in its employ. Dickinson and Banderas make things work, too, as best as they can, and Esther McGregor stands out as Romy’s no-bullshit daughter Isabel. However, there just isn’t enough given any of these actors to really full out. 

For the record, I didn’t dislike the film; I just find it frustrating that there are these truly compelling ideas left hanging and a truly remarkable central performance that carries along a balloon from which the air has leaked out by the second act. Her previous film was similarly populated by thinly written characters in an uneven script, but the whodunnit aspect kept the wheels turning - and overall, Bodies, Bodies, Bodies is pretty fun, something I can't say about Babygirl.