My family adopted a dog at the end of the summer. She’s a saint in the house, but she reacted to dogs on walks, so we worked with a trainer to help her behave better outside. As part of the process, the trainer asked me to read a book; Let Dogs Be Dogs: Understanding Canine Nature and Mastering the Art of Living With Your Dog. In a nutshell, that art involves understanding the essence of dogs as pack animals. In any human/canine relationship, there are power dynamics at work — even when the human remains oblivious to them. Whatever a dog’s bad behavior, the book argues, it likely stems from their human owner (me, in this case) not assuming an assertive enough role as pack leader.
I was listening to the audiobook of Let Dogs Be Dogs as I walked into the press screening of Babygirl. That was fortuitous timing; power dynamics like the ones described in it wind up being at the very heart of the film. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that its two central characters — Romy (Nicole Kidman) and Samuel (Harris Dickinson) — meet when the former is startled by the sight of a large dog biting a pedestrian. The dog lunges at Romy, only to be instantly calmed and quieted by Samuel and his alpha energy.
It turns out these two people are about to spend the rest of the film together. Samuel is headed to his first day interning at a tech company that specializes in warehouse automation. Romy is its CEO, and by most accounts she lives something like a perfect life. She runs her own successful company and lives (in multiple beautiful homes) with her warm and close-knit family, including two teenage daughters and her affectionate and attentive husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas). Romy and Jacob are both busy New York professionals — he’s a theater director hard at work on a new Broadway show — but they still find time for what appears to be a fairly active sex life.
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“By all accounts…,” “appears to be…” You see where this is going. Despite her personal and professional successes, Romy finds something lacking in her safe, comfortable existence. After she and Jacob have sex, she sneaks off to her office to watch porn on her laptop while she masturbates. And then she meets Samuel, who immediately clocks the way she stares at him in a room full of interns and senses what this powerful woman really craves is a loss of control.
With the confidence only a twentysomething tech bro could muster, Samuel requests Romy — the CEO of the entire company — as his internship mentor, and then uses their weekly meetings to test her desire to submit to someone else’s orders, even to someone so professionally subordinate to her that the very existence of a sexual relationship between them could jeopardize every aspect of her perfectly ordered life.
That’s Babygirl’s setup, and it’s one that could be lifted straight out of a ’90s erotic thriller — with a couple key differences. Almost all of those movies were told from the perspective of the man, with the women placed in secondary roles (quite often as deranged killers or stalkers). Babygirl observes this story from Romy’s point of view, and it works hard not to judge her particular kinks. This is an interesting, modernizing twist, something the film itself acknowledges. (“That’s a dated idea,” Samuel firmly tells another character who insists that female masochism is “nothing but a male fantasy.”)
Unfortunately, that same nonjudgmental impulse that makes Babygirl initially compelling eventually boomerangs back around on itself. Because the film is so clearly designed not to condemn Romy and her sexual proclivities, it’s surprisingly lacking in tension. Once you sense the film’s intentions, you also realize there’s only so many places Romy’s relationships with Jacob and Samuel can go. As a result, a movie that gets into some thorny issues about power, gender dynamics, and female sexuality, ultimately arrives at an ending that seems a little abrupt and anticlimactic.
Writer/director Halina Reijn surrounds this tale of carnal urges with grace notes about Romy’s company (which is cheekily named “Tensile”). Glimpses of its corporate culture suggest this is a modern workplace sensitive to the needs of its employees; Samuel attends an HR workshop where a video cheerfully asserts that the company is about “building a healthy, safe, inclusive workplace community,” while Romy herself says in a TV interview that as artificial intelligence proliferates her line work, it demands an equal increase in “emotional intelligence” to match it.
Truth be told, Babygirl doesn’t fully merge its spoof of modern corporate culture with its tale of illicit desire; you keep waiting for a firmer subplot to emerge from the scenes at Tensile. One never quite comes together.
The reason to see the film anyway are the performances by Kidman, Dickinson, and Banderas. Kidman will surely garner the most attention for the film, and that’s understandable; she allows herself to be extremely vulnerable in intimate scenes with both of her male co-stars, where the camera lingers on Kidman’s face as she reacts to each particular moment — with arousal, disgust, or fear, and sometimes combinations of the above all at once.
But both male leads are terrific too; Dickinson at exuding the alpha dog charisma needed to make Samuel appealing to a woman like Romy, and at still managing to make this guy read as an immature kid despite all his cocky swagger. Banderas seems a bit too suave to play Romy’s staid, stuffy husband, but he actually sells the against-type casting, and brings some unexpected energy to Babygirl’s later scenes as well.
In an earlier era, Babygirl might feel less novel, and its unwillingness to push its story into truly uncomfortable territory might be a bigger issue. These days, when Hollywood has pretty much abandoned sexuality as a topic of serious discussion, the film can easily lay claim to the title of top dog.
RATING: 7/10
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