Babygirl review - would-be steamy drama that only flirts with transgression

Babygirl starts with the sound of sex, piped in over the credits. There's a lot of it on our screens at the moment, from Disclaimer on Apple TV to Anora and Queer at the cinema, much of it noisily explicit. The intimacy co-ordinators must be having a field day.

Back in the saddle is Nicole Kidman, some 25 years after she appeared naked on the tiny Donmar stage, almost within touching distance of the audience. She has been eliciting cooing responses for her “bravery” in taking on her latest role, of a sexually unfulfilled CEO of a big robotics company who embarks on a dangerous affair with a much younger employee (Harris Dickinson). It’s not bravery so much as smart thinking, I'd say. She is overtly grasping a double-headed nettle here: how older women should approach ageing, tweakments and an unsatisfying sex life; and at the same time how an older actress should handle that kind of role. It’s a shame the film, directed by the Dutch actress turned writer-director Halina Reijn, isn’t the ideal frame for her efforts.

Babygirl’s Romy looks as if she might be a rerun of Kidman's best ever outing, as the ambitious, brittle weather girl in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For. But no, Romy is ambitious but no bitch. Although she has a glacial grip on her company, she goes to great pains to present herself as the Good Boss, warm and approachable; at home, similarly, she is the Perfect Mom/Wife. Her female colleagues see her as that rare beast, an inspirational woman CEO of a leading tech company, one specialising in automated warehousing solutions. It’s handily situated, not in Silicon Valley, but in the canyons of New York City, where the robotic little delivery trolleys on their tracks that we see in its corporate video echo the people in the grid of Manhattan outside, one big world of work, winners and losers.

Into this stratified arena comes a lanky intern in a cheap suit, Samuel, whose first encounter with Romy comes outside her office when he rescues her from a menacing dog that he somehow calms. It’s an over-obvious metaphor for the relationship that will evolve between them: she must first be cured of her attack-dog tendencies and forced to accept his mastery over her. "Good girl," he tells her when she obeys his tacit challenge to drink a glass of milk (pictured right) in a bar. Once equilibrium has been reached, in theory they can relax a little. 

Initially they seem on a collision course. Samuel has a highly developed BS-detector and is exasperated when Romy trots our her usual palliatives — “I want to protect you,” “I don’t want you to get hurt” — while clearly wanting him brought to her corporate tent. What does she really want, he shouts, determined they should reach an honest understanding about the sex games they have started playing, if they are to continue. But as Romy has spent almost two decades faking orgasms with her theatre director husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), this is not a behaviour she finds easy to learn and the training is harsh. Effectively, Samuel is asking her to jettison all the defensive-aggressive behaviour she has built up since graduating cum laude from Yale, and to state out loud that she will do whatever he asks her to do. Feminism, go fish.

This is a potential powder keg, especially when Samuel appears at Romy’s family home in the country. But apart from one (resolved) outburst, it doesn’t go off. Samuel doesn’t seem to be intent on actually humiliating Romy publicly, and this isn’t an Eighties erotic thriller featuring boiled bunnies or even Saltburn-style grand guignol. It’s more like a chess game with inventive orgasms. But Romy is too steeped in “old” ways of thinking to be entirely at ease with the situation, however much she laps up the sex. Jacob, too, is accused by Samuel of having an outmoded understanding of male sexuality. 

What are these new modern theories about sex, though? We have to guess from Samuel's behaviour. There's also a steer in Romy’s older daughter, Isabel (Esther Rose McGregor): bolshy, lesbian and cool, who sees sex with a friend as no threat to her main relationship. The younger women at Romy’s company are equally confident and competent, though one, Esme (Sophie Wilde), who starts dating Samuel, is not at all like Romy in her sexual needs, according to him. He likes them both, in their different compartments, playing to different sets of rules. But who makes all these rules? Samuel proves it can be the apparently less powerful player; he has muted Romy, who can’t silence him in turn without consequences and risks being accused of sexual harassment, pilloried and chucked out of her job. Is he really a calculating stalker, the cuckoo causing chaos he talks about? Is she really a victim? 

Hard to say or to care that much. There are regular attempts to heighten the atmosphere to pressure-cooker levels with bursts of bombastic pounding music, but nothing that cataclysmic happens, and who the script is rooting for is left wide open. It’s not a comedy, a satire, a tragedy or a study of transgressive behaviour; it seems suspiciously like a chance for an older actress to show she is still a contender for sex scenes. Certainly it fills the bill as an 18-rated release.

Kidman is suitably bold as Romy, stripping off and simulating orgasms all over the place. It’s not an attractive role: a successful climax causes her to bellow like a stuck beast. She appears in some scenes, shock horror, with no makeup on at all, though we also see her having a Botox session — I am hoping her tongue was firmly in her cheek for that scene. Narratively, we are 100% with her as she moves from close-up to close-up, watching her change under Samuel’s tutelage. But however intense the pressure, it’s hard to be emotionally engaged with a character who is a changing set of poses, many of them less than honest.

It’s Dickinson who fascinates. Ever since he burst onto television screens in an exhilarating turn as the kidnapped Getty heir in the FX series Trust, this British actor has been an intelligent, increasingly impressive presence. His impassive face can conceal complex personalities, summoned by a flicker of a smile or a wide-eyed look that says, “I see you”— the confused teenager in Beach Rats, the raw young father reunited with his daughter in Scrapper, the male-model-on-the-make in Triangle of Sadness. There’s a tender and vulnerable side to him, too, that makes his performances compelling. And he’s surprisingly sexy here, especially in the scene where he does a post-coital swaying dance while a seated Romy looks on. It’s almost worth the price of admission.

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