Romy (Nicole Kidman) and Samuel (Harris Dickinson) star in Babygirl. Photo / A24
In an A24 film, the actress takes on what may be her most risque role yet as a high-powered CEO in a steamy psycho-sexual affair with her intern, played by rising star Harris Dickinson.
The unmistakable sounds of Nicole Kidman orgasming echoed throughout the theatre at the Venice Film Festival before the camera had even revealed her face, mid-act.
The actress, 57, has made a career of daring explorations of sexuality on film.
But writer-director Halina Reijn’s erotic thriller Babygirl — in which Kidman plays a high-powered chief executive who risks her career and her marriage when she starts exploring her need to be dominated in a volatile affair with a much-younger intern (Harris Dickinson, 28) — may be her kinkiest role since 1999′s orgiastic Eyes Wide Shut.
Or 2004′s controversial Birth, in which she falls in love with a little boy she believes is the reincarnation of her dead husband. Or 2012′s The Paperboy, a Lee Daniels’ joint in which she plays a sexual obsessive with not-so-vanilla predilections.
“Thank you all for this very disturbing movie,” one reporter said at the Friday news conference to hoots and cheers before the film’s premiere that evening.
Disturbing? Maybe. But it’s a movie that also seems destined to turn Dickinson into your latest obsession, launch Kidman into the awards conversation (if voters aren’t too prudish) and go toe-to-toe with Challengers for the title of sexiest film of the year.
Reijn, who’s also a well-known Dutch actress, said in the film’s press notes that she was inspired by working with Paul Verhoeven, director of Basic Instinct, as well as a story she heard about a woman who had never experienced an orgasm with her husband in 25 years of marriage.
She wanted to make something like the erotic thrillers she grew up loving, including 9½ Weeks and The Piano Teacher, but told from a female point of view.
How long could a woman hold back her animalistic urges? How long could she stay silent about something so fundamental, for the shame of making her desires known? And what would unleash when she finally hit a crisis point?
“It’s about sex, it’s about desire, it’s about your inner thoughts, it’s about secrets, it’s about marriage, it’s about truth, power, consent,” Kidman said at the news conference.
“This is one woman’s story and this is, I hope, a very liberating story. It’s told by a woman, through her gaze. Halina wrote the script, she directed it. And that’s, to me, what made it so unique … Suddenly, I was going to be in the hands of a woman’s material.”
Kidman’s Romy Mathis meets Dickinson’s Samuel as if in a fever dream, during an encounter with a rabid dog outside the office.
He turns out to be one of a new class of interns, but his audacious, playful familiarity with Romy and disregard for her authority is immediately apparent. “Hey,” he says as they pass in the halls. “You shouldn’t drink coffee after lunch,” he says, abruptly and almost scoldingly, in the office kitchen.
Soon he’s signed up to be her mentee in a programme that she didn’t know she was participating in, he is telling her that she needs to set up a meeting with him.
At after-hours drinks, as Romy is sitting at a table with her managers and the interns are goofing off at the bar, a glass of milk unexpectedly arrives at her table. She’s taken aback — then, staring straight at him with burning anger in her eyes, drinks the whole thing.
As he passes her on his way out the door, Samuel leans in and whispers, “Good girl.” It’s indescribably hot.
When the two move from the public to the private sphere, she reprimands Samuel about his “inappropriate” and “wild” behaviour, even as she’s obeying him to stand facing a corner or eating candy out of his hand while on her knees.
He sees her and how she needs to not be in control. But there’s also an undertone of danger that never lets up.
Romy has her theatre-director husband (Antonio Banderas) and two teenage daughters at home. Samuel is, as he points out, “a stranger” who could make one phone call and destroy her life. It’s hard to tell if it’s a threat or another part of the game.
The shocking realism of their scenes was helped not just by an intimacy co-ordinator, but by Reijn, who, would “throw herself around the rehearsal scenes, playing all the roles” and even jump into bed with them. Kidman said she’d never experienced anything like it, and she loved it.
Asked how she related to Romy, Kidman replied it was in how “nervous” she was feeling at that very moment.
“This definitely leaves me exposed and vulnerable and frightened and all of those things when it’s given to the world,” she said. “I was like, ‘I hope my hands aren’t shaking.’”
Kidman is certainly exposed — naked, actually — in multiple scenes, but whenever you think the movie is heading into X-rated, psycho-thriller territory, it zags into someplace less generic and more loving than expected.
Both Samuel and Romy are just fumbling through it, figuring out what the dom-sub relationship looks like to them. Dickinson said he thought a lot about how Samuel represents “the confusion within a young man of now … about how to conduct yourself [in the world] and how to conduct yourself within sex.”
Journalists from Latin countries wanted to know how Banderas could possibly take a part as a cuckold.
Casting someone as handsome and charming as him was deliberate, Reijn said, because she didn’t want this to be a story about a woman who has a husband not worthy of her, but rather a woman who’s in a crisis of learning how to find self-love and her own voice.
Banderas, for his part, signed on immediately, he said, because he wanted to highlight the kind of “self-censorship” we’ve all started employing in the age of “political correctness” that leads to all of us sticking ourselves in boxes and repressing our animal nature.
Another reporter referred to ‘80s movies like Fatal Attraction and asked why a boss sleeping with her employee wasn’t being punished for her lust, like in those thrillers.
Yet another spoke about being Kidman’s age. How in the world was the actress so brave as to let us see her body, at her age, and to use it as a sort of weapon, when she was raised to hate her own?
Kidman couldn’t allow herself to think about it or get self-conscious about it, she said. “I don’t know any other way I could go into the environment, [if I were] protecting myself, being worried. I have to just go, ‘Okay, what do you want me to do?’”
Reijn stepped in, too, to thank the reporter for bringing up the important subject of women’s relationships with their bodies.
If the movie moved any hearts and minds, she hoped it was toward liberation and having more and better sex. “And that’s exactly why I wanted to make this movie, the female orgasm. The huge orgasm gap!”
Banderas couldn’t help but chime in that he thought his character got better at it.
“Sure,” said Kidman. “Maybe.”
Opinion: Weta collaborations and wide spaces make the possibilities endless, and complex.