“This film tries to be too clever and instead becomes clumsy. It looks to titillate rather than investigate the reasons why this sort of relationship works and demeans the subject and the audience.“
Con Nats
2 glasses of milk
Nicole gets her Sharon Stone on and goes into the psycho-sexual Babygirl with her eyes wide open.
The film opens with a top view of Romy (Nicole Kidman) and her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) bonking. There’s something amiss here as she runs off to watch porn to achieve an orgasm.
Romy is the CEO of a robotics company which uses AI. She’s a high powered business woman who keeps her body fit and her face botoxed. She’s married to a successful theatre director (Antonio Banderas) and has two daughters – one who is happy go-silly and one who is rebellious, gay and hates her.
She sees a young guy (Harris Dickinson, Triangle of Sadness) bring an angry dog under control and is transfixed. He’s Samuel, who happens to be an intern at her company, and they connect through a mentorship programme. They’re both highly intelligent as they can both calculate how many ping-pong balls can fit in a room! Amazing. Humanity saved. From their first meeting, he starts to flirt in a demeaning way and she doesn’t fire him. At an office party he sends her a glass of milk. She drinks it.
Their first tryst shows their affair will be based on humiliation with Samuel as her dominant master. It’s a role reversal to show that people who like control in life can be submissive sexually. How clever.
This scene is clumsy rather than erotic and the montage that follows is more about them grunting and grinding than this ‘unique’ aspect of their affair. It dominates the second act.
The script does look at the power balance and how it shifts to Samuel as he threatens her career and they both become more reckless. The problem is that this role reversal on a role reversal ends up with a woman being dominated by a man, which is back to where we started.
It’s surprising that the writer-director is a woman: Halina Rejin, as the themes of a woman being a slave to her desires is a demeaning one. And to give it more salt, it also adds a sub-plot of a female staff member, Esme (Sophie Wilde) using blackmail to advance her career, just like all the men told you they do.
The second surprise is that actors as good as Banderas thought this script worth their talent. Kidman is a natural as an ice queen with a submissive streak but not as convincing as a highly intelligent ruthless CEO. And her submissive scenes inspire cringe rather than curiosity. It’s hard to care about the selfish and it’s hard to believe she won awards for this role.
The final act is too easily resolved and contrived. For a story that tries to be bold about the power balance of a dominant-submissive relationship, it squibs it by omitting a final confrontation between the two leads and I cannot accept the twists it tries to shoehorn in ie she was in control the whole time. Films like Secretary handled this much more subtly. This film tries to be too clever and instead becomes clumsy. It looks to titillate rather than investigate the reasons why this sort of relationship works and demeans the subject and the audience.
Con Nats, On The Screen
