Happy New Year! Will you upgrade to paid to support all the work I’ll do here in 2025? It’s only $5 a month. The roleplay of everyday life'Babygirl' takes on the suffocating roles of Wife and Mom, while scripting a fantasy where being bad is *good.*
Babygirl opens with a woman faking it. We see Romy, played by Nicole Kidman, having wordless standard-issue straight marital sex. She performs a pretty little orgasm before hopping off of her seemingly clueless husband Jacob, played by Antonio Banderas. She promptly flees to another corner of the house, where she secretly gets off, with an animalistic grunt, to kinky “daddy” porn. Then Romy dons a floral apron and packs lunches for her kids, tucking a handwritten note inside. She heads to her high-powered job as CEO of a robotics company. We see footage of robots and conveyor belts efficiently processing boxes in a shipping warehouse. Clearly, we’re meant to see that Romy herself is trapped in a series of boxes. In each box, she plays a different role. She is a one-woman economy of containment and optimization. The director Halina Reijn says that Babygirl is about “identity and roleplaying.” If you’ve heard anything about the film, you know that it’s about roleplay of the kinky variety, as Romy quickly falls into a sadomasochistic affair. But it’s also a film about the false and suffocating roles that we play in everyday life. In that sense, this movie is in conversation with so many books, TV shows, and movies from the last year, from All Fours to The Idea of You. What I find most rewarding about Babygirl—aside from Harris Dickinson dancing shirtless to George Michael’s “Father Figure”—is that it offers hopeful glimpses of the potential for using sex to play with these roles while also upending their meaning. From the start, Romy switches dizzyingly between playing the part of wife, mom, and CEO, and with no small degree of tension. “As a woman, you feel so much pressure to be the mother, the lover—all these archetypes,” explains Reijn. “I wanted to take this almost literally.” Sometimes it is as if Romy has been caught wearing the wrong costume, like when Jacob, a Broadway director, critiques the floral apron that Romy wears to pack those school lunches (maybe The Husband wants her dressed less as Mom and more as Wife or Lover). On the sidewalk outside of Romy’s sleek skyscraper office, she has her meet-kink with Samuel, played by Dickinson, who saves her from being attacked by a vicious German Shepherd. This much younger man in an ill-fitting suit swiftly tames the snarling beast that threatens to tear Romy apart. All he has to do is calmly offer the animal a treat and tell it, “Good girl.” When Romy finally steps inside her office, she sits down in front of a camera to film a publicity video for a product launch. It is yet another performance, one that comes with a literal script. Well, into this world of empty corporate jargon strides Samuel: it turns out he’s an intern at her company. “I think you like to be told what to do,” he boldly tells her during a one-on-one meeting at work. She likes it. Later, at an after-hour work event at a bar, he orders Romy a glass of milk. When she gulps it down, he tells her, “Good girl,” just like the dog. At first, Samuel seems like he’s trying to figure out exactly the role that Romy wants him to play. Early on, he tells her, “Get on your knees.” Then he bursts out laughing, suddenly doubting his dominant posturing. “I just feel… is that what you want? I don’t know how to… if that’s what you want. Be honest.” (Best scene in the film, aside from the aforementioned dancing, which I could watch on loop from now to eternity.) There follows a messy push and pull, and some confused wrestling on the floor, as they both try to sort out what exactly they’re doing. It’s all meant to feel like a rare unscripted moment in Romy’s life, and it leaves her grunting with pleasure into the hotel carpet. We’re then dropped into a pretty stock montage of fucking before we land on some indelible scenes, like Romy lapping milk out of a saucer and Samuel in turn licking it from her face. Her life is full of rules and regimentation, but with Samuel it seems she finds a form of discipline that feels freeing. Together, they create an alternate universe where being “bad” actually makes her “good.” She is praised for breaking out of her suffocating roles. This narrative of escape is quickly complicated by the fact that Samuel threatens to apply for a transfer to another office if she doesn’t continue to comply with their erotic arrangement, which she is convinced will result in the affair being exposed and her getting fired. Samuel does some other disturbing shit, too, like showing up at her family’s home uninvited and telling her that he could drown her as they swim in a pool at night. Presumably, these threats are performed for Romy’s benefit, since he seems to understand that she’s turned on by actual risk, but it’s not totally clear. This is where Reijn’s professed love for 90s erotic thrillers complicates her “identity and roleplay” aims. All along, at home with Jacob, Romy fakes every orgasm. Her husband wants to make love. He wants eye contact and sweet nothings, but Romy secretly craves something darker. When she finally tries to tell him about her fantasies, she has to hide under their bedsheet to get the words out (another fantastic scene). “I want you to watch porn while you have sex with me,” she says, but he can’t do it. That kind of sex makes him “feel like a villain,” he says. When it’s time to come up with a safe word to use with Samuel, she chooses “Jacob.” She chooses her husband’s name. If that isn’t a perfect distillation of the mood around straight marital sex, I don’t know what is. I’ve noticed a familiar refrain across Reijn’s interviews. “Sometimes it's harder to be yourself with your partner of 25 years than it is to be with a stranger because you can be reborn in the moment,” she said in Entertainment Weekly. Similarly, Reijn told Interview, “The irony of it is, sometimes you are more free sexually with someone you’ve never met before than with your partner that you’ve spent all these years with.” This isn’t just because of the erotic drain of everyday domestic closeness. It’s the way that heteronormative marriage and parenthood come with pre-scripted roles—Mother and Wife, Father and Husband—which can make us into strangers. Reijn, an actress herself, sees Babygirl as being in conversation with the “mythical, iconic” parts that she has played on stage. “I sometimes feel I’m bewitched by these roles, and making these movies almost as a response—even if nobody knows it except me—is healing,” she says. In the end, Romy takes on too many different roles, which inevitably forces a reckoning. Thankfully, she isn’t punished in the style of those 90s erotic thrillers. The ending is somewhat ambiguous, and I don’t want to spoil too much, but it could certainly be interpreted as Romy’s version of healing (a version I found pretty disappointing). I wanted more from Babygirl on a story and character level. For all its moments of lush erotic scenery, I agree with Jen Winston that the movie “stays on the surface” and fails to meaningfully dive into Romy’s desires, as well as her shame. But, look. Look. When the credits started to roll at the end and the lights came on, a man in the theater booed. A full on “boooo,” as though a rival sports team had just scored a goal. He hated the film—and it made me like it just a little bit more. Liked this one? Will you upgrade to paid to support the work I do here? It’s just $50 a year or $5 a month.
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četvrtak, 2. siječnja 2025.
The roleplay of everyday life
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