Baby­girl review – intel­li­gent, ele­gant adult filmmaking

While the inter­net con­tin­ues to debate the ​“neces­si­ty” of sex scenes in cin­e­ma, the sick­os and freaks among us are cry­ing out for more car­nal plea­sure 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 since the begin­ning of time, but appar­ent­ly 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 (Nicole Kid­man) knows all about the pow­er of denial. Despite being adored by hus­band Jacob (Anto­nio Ban­deras), she’s nev­er once orgasmed dur­ing sex with him in 19 years of mar­riage – she instead sneaks 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. Yet when she’s intro­duced to Samuel (Har­ris Dick­in­son), the new, strong-willed intern, her 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, 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 gaze.

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. Reijn’s wry swipes at the lan­guage of pinkwashed cor­po­rate fem­i­nism land much bet­ter than the Gen Z jokes of Sarah DeLappe’s Bod­ies Bod­ies Bod­ies script, and an exchange re. the ​“male fan­ta­sy” of ​“female masochism” wry­ly exor­cis­es anoth­er old myth about what (some) women want. Baby­girl joins a lim­it­ed canon of films that takes the 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.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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