Warning: Spoilers ahead.
I don’t know if anyone else is going to call Babygirl, directed by Dutch actor Halina Reijn, a feel-good movie. But, boy, it made me feel good.
It’s the story of a powerful, married, middle-aged CEO and mother, Rory (Nicole Kidman), who chooses to act out her secret sadomasochistic sexual fantasies with Samuel (Harris Dickenson), a young stud—who happens to be her intern. In other words, our heroine is a bad, bad babygirl. You moralists will be glad to know she doesn’t get away scot-free with her transgressions. She suffers from deep emotional conflict and the real threat of losing everything dear to her.
But huzzah! She doesn’t die. In fact the movie ends with an intimate close-up of a satisfied smile, and it is post-coital, and it is hers.
This, I believe, is a small triumph of modern cinema.
Think of the outcome of other movies about women bold enough to risk going for what they want, whether in their appearance, their sexual desires, or their career. Most recently, The Substance, widely touted as a tongue-in-cheek feminist narrative mocking the debilitating limits of Hollywood beauty culture, kills off its heroine (Demi Moore) in the most gruesome, punishing way. (More of what I have to say about that here.) Or how about the highly respected conductor (Cate Blanchett) in Tar who slowly loses her mind before she is reduced, for her various misappropriations, to conducting a humiliating ragtag orchestra of cosplayers?
As we watch Samuel insinuate himself in increasingly intrusive ways into Rory’s life, it becomes clear that he’s a predator, which fits in nicely with Rory’s submissive fantasies. The guy is hot, and pretty weird, manifesting various clues to the potential ramifications of his dark sexual power: He wears a gold necklace, for one thing, which makes him look kind of “street” under his corporate suit. More alarming, on his ripped flank he sports a tattoo of a black-hooded angel, seeming to be wielding a rifle (rather than the traditional bow-and-arrow). In various hotel rooms, Rory submits to his demands to stand in the corner facing the wall, get on all fours, lap up milk from a saucer on the floor, which—is it just me?—seems kind of tame in the BDSM world. But for Rory, used to being the Bossgirl, it represents a loss of power she finds irresistibly arousing. Whenever things get really steamy between them, the camera is almost always on Rory’s face, portrait-like, so that whatever Samuel is doing to her is a background blur. (To act convincingly like you’re having a volcanic orgasm while there’s a camera intently focused on your face, I mean, could you do that? I think Kidman deserves an Oscar for those scenes alone.)
