Baby­girl – first-look review

While the inter­net con­tin­ues to debate the ​“neces­si­ty” of sex scenes in cin­e­ma year in year out, the sick­os and freaks among us are cry­ing out for more film­mak­ers who refuse to shy away from show­ing car­nal plea­sures on screen. To deny the exis­tence and pow­er of desire is to deny a valu­able (often fun!) part of the human expe­ri­ence – col­lec­tive­ly we’ve been doing it for thou­sands of years, but in much of soci­ety it’s still con­sid­ered more dis­taste­ful to sim­u­late sex than to depict some­one being vio­lent­ly murdered.

In Hali­na Reijn’s Baby­girl, cor­po­rate high-fli­er Romy Math­is (Nicole Kid­man) knows all about the pow­er of denial. Despite her hus­band Jacob’s (Anto­nio Ban­deras) clear ado­ra­tion of her, she’s nev­er once orgasmed dur­ing sex with him in 19 years of mar­riage – she makes do with sneak­ing off to mas­tur­bate while watch­ing BDSM porn. Romy has con­vinced her­self that her desire for a more dom­i­nant sex­u­al part­ner is shame­ful, instead throw­ing all her ener­gy into run­ning her suc­cess­ful tech automa­tion com­pa­ny, but when her assis­tant Esmé (Sophie Wilde) intro­duces her to Samuel (Har­ris Dick­in­son), the new, strong-willed intern at Ten­sile Robot­ics, her care­ful­ly repressed appetite comes back with new voracity.

Rei­jn first explored illic­it desire and gen­dered pow­er dynam­ics in her fea­ture debut Instinct (where a prison ther­a­pist devel­ops an infat­u­a­tion with her vio­lent, charis­mat­ic patient, who is a con­vict­ed ser­i­al rapist) and Baby­girl is per­haps more palat­able in a sense – the old­er woman still pos­sess­es the tra­di­tion­al posi­tion of supe­ri­or­i­ty (her job) but her intrigue and infat­u­a­tion with a younger man push­es her to rescind some of her hard-won con­trol. But as Samuel – pro­ject­ing boy­ish con­fi­dence but preter­nat­ur­al wis­dom – points out, ​“I think you like being told what to do.”

What Romy dis­cov­ers with Samuel is not the exis­tence of her sex­u­al desires, but the space to explore them. Meet­ing for illic­it trysts in opu­lent hotel rooms (her choice) and grimy under­ground raves (his choice) they find each oth­er again and again with mag­net­ic inten­si­ty, despite attempts to call it off. The chem­istry between Kid­man and Dick­in­son is stratos­pher­ic but not pure­ly sex­u­al – Romy and Samuel are as vicious with each oth­er as they are ten­der, each able to see some­thing in the oth­er that no one has even tried look­ing for. And while Kid­man has long pos­sessed a glassi­ness that makes her hyp­not­ic to watch, here there is real vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty too, in the ner­vous dart of her eyes and the way she squirms as she tries to hide her naked body from Samuel’s unwa­ver­ing gaze.

Dick­in­son – who in less than a decade has built an excel­lent act­ing CV – match­es her beat for beat as the enig­mat­ic would-be dom in their dynam­ic, and the dis­tance the audi­ence retains from both char­ac­ters – only hear­ing their back­sto­ries in occa­sion­al snip­pets – dis­pels the idea that there is some defin­ing ​“flaw” that cre­ates the desire for a dom/​sub dynam­ic. Reijn’s char­ac­ters are fleshed out by per­for­mance rather than didac­ti­cism, and the entire cast is mes­meris­ing, from Kid­man and Dick­in­son to Ban­deras – cast against type as a slight­ly goofy man who strug­gles to sat­is­fy his wife – and Wilde as Romy’s shad­ow who has learned shrewd oper­a­tion from the best.

Cru­cial­ly Reijn’s script retains a sense of humour, care­ful to illus­trate that good sex isn’t just about orgasms and fan­ta­sy ful­fil­ment – it’s about plea­sure. The degree of awk­ward­ness that Romy and Samuel expe­ri­ence while test­ing the bound­aries of their rela­tion­ship illus­trates the com­plex­i­ties of BDSM and the need for clear com­mu­ni­ca­tion as well as accep­tance of the fact that yes, some­times it’s kind of weird (in one charm­ing moment, Samuel bursts out laugh­ing after try­ing to author­i­ta­tive­ly com­mand Romy to get on her knees for the first time). The age gap between the two is acknowl­edged par­tic­u­lar­ly with­in their dif­fer­ing ideas around sex; Samuel, much younger, is more pro­gres­sive, though quite insis­tent that Romy doesn’t treat him with kid gloves.

It’s the sort of intel­li­gent, ele­gant adult film­mak­ing that is fre­quent­ly lack­ing in mod­ern cin­e­ma, approach­ing a com­plex theme not only with nuance and empa­thy but refresh­ing can­dour, all while being gen­uine­ly erot­ic and styl­ish. Jas­par Wolf’s inti­mate cin­e­matog­ra­phy and Cristo­bal Tapia de Veer’s breathy, intense score com­ple­ment Kurt and Bart’s con­sid­ered cos­tume design, and the ​“show don’t tell” approach works won­ders for char­ac­ters who fre­quent­ly strug­gle to communicate.

At the same time, Reijn’s wry swipes at the emp­ty lan­guage of pinkwashed cor­po­rate fem­i­nism land much bet­ter than the Gen Z jokes of Sarah DeLappe’s Bod­ies Bod­ies Bod­ies script, and an exchange about the ​“male fan­ta­sy” of ​“female masochism” wry­ly exor­cis­es anoth­er old myth about what (some) women want. Baby­girl joins Sec­re­tary and The Feel­ing That The Time For Doing Some­thing Has Passed in the still rel­a­tive­ly lim­it­ed canon of cin­e­ma that takes this much-maligned sub­sect of female sex­u­al desire seri­ous­ly, while also serv­ing as a com­pelling psy­chodra­ma about the intri­ca­cies of trust and under­stand­ing, even in a long-stand­ing relationship.