Nicole Kidman goes to the far side of psychosexual debasement in Halina Reijn’s Venice premiere “Babygirl.” Kidman plays Romy, the high-powered executive atop a New York shipping company whose carefully controlled life and secret desires are ripped open by a newly arrived intern, Samuel (Harris Dickinson), whom she first meets when he saves her from a near-dog attack.
In one of Kidman’s most exposing roles (mentally and physically, as she’s often nude or on the verge of gettingnaked), the Oscar winner starts a what-else-but-lurid affair built around domination and private humiliation with the younger Samuel. Dickinson’s character exploits Romy’s position of power to manipulate her into being the sub in their relationship — as thrilled as she is to go along with it, especially given unsatisfying (but very regular) sex with a husband played by Antonio Banderas. Guttural onscreen orgasms, bare skin, on-all-fours sex, finger-fucking, and kink abound in a movie destined to stir conversation all year.
“We are living in a world in which [being] politically correct has established a censorship with artists, and when I read the script Halina gave me, [I thought], there’s somebody who’s thinking out of the box,” Banderas said at the press conference held at the Palazzo del Casino. “[Who has] the strength and courageous mind to just put on the screen things that we all think. We are, in a way, prisoners of our own instincts. We are animals. There’s something in our nature – there is nothing democratic in our nature. We didn’t ask to be born. We didn’t ask to be humans or animals or plants or whatever. We are attached to where we are, and this woman talks about that with an incredible freedom… That is the reason I jumped into this project.”
“It’s about desires, your inner thoughts, it’s about secrets, marriage, truth, power, consent, the language [around] sex,” Kidman said. “It’s told by a woman through her gaze, and that’s what it made it so unique. Suddenly, I was going to be in the hands of a woman with this material. It was very deep and very freeing to be able to share those things.”
Writer/director Halina Reijn’s third feature — and her first since “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” also an A24 release — is a classy, contemporary update on erotic cult movies like “Secretary” and “9 1/2 Weeks.” Reijn, who worked as an actress on Paul Verhoeven’s “Black Book,” also channels the Dutch director’s own ’90s erotic thrillers. With a Christmas Day release in the cards from A24, and more festival play along the way including at TIFF, expect chatter around “Babygirl” for the rest of the year. And Friday morning’s “Babygirl” press screening was certainly a potent jolt to the Venice Film Festival after the mixed critical reception to Pablo Larraín’s “Maria.”
“For each person that sees the film to interpret it, their interpretation will be wildly different,” Kidman said when asked about any parallels to her abused “Big Little Lies” character. “If we polled everyone in this room, they’d have a completely different reaction to Romy and the way she behaves. My connection to it is I want to examine human beings. I want to examine women onscreen, what it means to be human in all the facets of that and the labyrinth of that.”
“Men, women, giraffes, all beings have different sights within themselves, and we all have a beast living inside ourselves. For women, we have not gotten a lot of space yet to explore this behavior, not only how strong we are but how weak we sometimes are,” Reijn said. “I don’t believe in good and evil. We are all both, and we need to shine a light on that. The moment we suppress it, that’s when it becomes dangerous. I don’t want any of my characters to be punished. I just want them to be. That’s when we can really connect with them and feel less alone.”
Asked about exposing her body in the film, Kidman said, “I approach everything artistically, so I don’t think of the minutiae. I just go, how do I give over to this particular character fully without censoring my director? That’s why it is important to feel safe because [otherwise] I will feel abandoned … I don’t think about bodies per se. I just think about how we tell the story, what is the vision for it, and how do I help you get there?”
In the film, Kidman’s character is sexually frustrated by her husband, entering the power-imbalanced affair with Samuel ultimately in search of an orgasm. Reijn said she made the movie to interrogate “women’s relationship to their bodies” and “the orgasm gap, the huge orgasm gap, that still exists. Take note, men. That’s part of the joy on this movie. Not you, Harris,” she joked.
In terms of the actors first meeting and how they prepped for the film’s often kinky sex scenes, Kidman said, “We met in New York in a rehearsal space. We had not a lot of time to make the film. That’s why we needed to rehearse, and there’s a lot of text. It twists, and it winds, so we sat in a room for six hours and we just talked. In terms of the actual work, we sat and went through things. Primarily it was talking about ourselves, which is a great way to come together because you share things… Halina is an actress herself, so she’d be throwing herself around the rehearsal space playing all the roles, and that was fascinating because I’d never experienced that before.”
Dickinson said the film’s intimacy coordinator helped to break “the unnecessary barrier around the conversation of what to do [in sex scenes], because it is choreography, when you get into the nitty gritty of those scenes.”
“I knew she wasn’t going to exploit me. However anyone interprets that, I didn’t feel exploited,” Kidman said of director Reijn. “There was enormous caretaking by all of us, we were all very gentle with each other and helped each other. It felt very authentic, protected and, at the same time, real.”
Earlier in the presser, to best sum up the movie, Reijn said, “The core of it is about: Can I love myself in all my different layers? I hope it will function as a tribute to self-love and liberation.”
