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Warning: This piece involves description ofBabygirlsending.
Her wardrobe primarily consists of cool beiges, slate grays, creams, and ochres.
Their sexual dynamic is clear: He initiates, she keeps quiet about what she truly wants.
Here, her moan is raw and guttural.
InBabygirl, the girlboss isnt being vilified or even critiqued, but explored with a canny interest.
His toying and obvious attraction to her awakens something within Romy.
Samuel: I gave him a cookie.
Romy: You always have cookies on you?
Samuel: Yeah … why?
Do you want one?
These detours might make you thinkBabygirlis an erotic thriller, but it ultimately lacks the genres signature emotional thrust.
To start with, the sex scenes: they might be well-choreographed, but they never quite overheat.
The film is otherwise measured, outright crisp in its cerebral plunge into the liminal spaces of modern sexuality.
But when so much of the outre sexuality of women portrayed on-screen exists in this lane, it grates.
But I dont want films to merely or even primarily reflect real life.
Im not saying these experiences arent shared by women.
I just question the fantasies women are repeatedly sold.
Namely because Romys sexual abjection is riddled with empty contradictions that demonstrate the limitations of the script.
Their affair is tentative at first.
But they start to find a rhythm.
They have sex in Romys corner office bathroom, in swankier hotels.
He tells her to take off her panties and spread her legs, and she does.
He beckons her to lap milk from a saucer like his own personal sex kitten.
They crash into each other, pushing boundaries away like smoke from their eyes.
But theres never a moment that felt all that bracing.
After a certain point, the idea of her losing everything wasnt glaring but ambient to the story.
The film cares more for Romys enveloping sense of self than the depths of her immorality.
(How can you not think ofEyes Wide Shutwhen watching this movie?)
In my first viewing, I believed her affair with Samuel was a means of self-revelation.
But by the end of the film and certainly during my second viewing it felt more like self-negation.
Shes emptying herself of history, allowing Samuel to treat her as a vessel.
Both Dickinson and Kidman go full throttle toward this vulnerability.
It isnt a fiery collision but a snag.
A momentary ruffle in the otherwise smooth pleats of Romys overly-tended life.
Youre one of the few women who made it to the top.
My interest is in keeping you there.
Not as you are now.
But as a version of you I can look up to.
She says the affair was a one-off fling with a stranger.
She still cant describe what she wants.
Jacob reaches his limit and kicks her out of the house.
She flees to the upstate home, only to wake one evening to find Samuel swimming in her pool.
Did I mess with your head?
Yeah … but I messed with yours too.
The reconnection that Esme warned would never happen finds its tenderness dashed by the sudden appearance of Jacob.
First the viewer notices his shadowed form rooted in the doorway, then Romy does.
Soon enough things get ugly.
Jacob is rightfully pissed for being lied to two times over.
Samuel and Jacob become a furious tangle of limbs, punches thrown, wounds tended with frozen vegetables.
Jacob believes Romy used and abused Samuel, that her fantasies are not quite her own.
Thats a dated idea of sexuality.
Im sorry you dont understand, Samuel counters.
Because you look like a mother and Im not interested in that.
Jacob has his own contradictions or, at least, he should.
The scene feels like a flimsy ellipsis rather than the long held exhale it should.
The thin characterization beyond Kidman the opaqueness of the world around her is also a tell.
The men in womens pictures especially the husbands are archetypes.
They have to be people.
Raw-nerved, ravenous, and revealing in every gesture.
They need to feel mordant in the observations their lives dramatically bring to the fore.
He isnt a counterweight, hes too seemingly perfect.
The kinds that imagine womens sexuality beyond the limitations of abjection.
