“Babygirl” and the trouble with equality

Played ELECTRIcALLY by Nicole Kidman, the protagonist of “Babygirl” is a glamorous high-flyer with a secret woe: sexual frustration. But “at the end of the movie, that problem is fixed,” observed Antonio Banderas, who plays her husband, at the Venice Film Festival, where the erotic thriller had its premiere. “Maybe,” Ms Kidman shot back.

Which goes to show that responses to “Babygirl”, out on Christmas Day in America and elsewhere in January, may vary between the sexes, and, probably, between generations. Back Story is a middle-aged man with Gen-X ideas about feminism and fairness. For him, a provocative film that aspires to be radical winds up seeming oddly reactionary.

Ms Kidman is Romy Mathis, the boss of a logistics firm with a glitzy headquarters in Manhattan. The company does something with warehouses, though exactly what is unclear: those are not the sort of logistics this movie is most interested in. Romy is glimpsed in a lift, surrounded by men, like Margaret Thatcher with her cabinet. She has a palatial apartment and a swish country house, which she shares with her two teenage daughters and Jacob, her handsome nice-guy spouse.

Alas, there is a wrinkle in superwoman paradise (even if there are none on Romy’s Botoxed face). In bed with Jacob, she fakes every climax, then puts on one of her deluxe camisoles, scoots down a marbled corridor, cranks up her laptop and gets her kicks from brutal porn. Ms Kidman has starred as monied matriarchs in a run of recent tv shows, from “The Undoing” to “The Perfect Couple”. Romy is their kinkier sister.

Enter Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a swaggering and impertinent intern. As well as being Romy’s underling, Samuel is a bit of rough. You can tell by the chain he wears and, when he gets his kit off, his tattoos. On brief acquaintance he spots a proclivity that, despite their decades-long relationship, Romy’s doting husband has missed. “I think you like to be told what to do,” Samuel says. Chalk it up to his male intuition. Or maybe it’s a lucky guess.

Fleetingly Romy clings to the human-resources argot of “inappropriate” and “unacceptable” behaviour. But soon the pair are rendezvousing in seedy hotel rooms and toilet cubicles. She crawls around on the floor, eats from Samuel’s hand like a dog and laps milk from a saucer on all fours. “You know things,” she purrs. “You sense things.” “Sometimes I scare myself,” Samuel replies modestly.

“We all have a beast living inside of ourselves,” Halina Reijn, the writer and director, said in Venice. If, like Jacob, you are inclined to think that “female masochism is nothing but a male fantasy”, her film will try to persuade you that your ideas about sex and desire are outdated. Whereas, in “Fatal Attraction” and other adultery dramas of yore, women tended to suffer for their lust, Ms Reijn didn’t “want any of [her] characters to be punished”.

But perhaps Romy deserves some punishment (not just the kind she enjoys). For if the movie’s cinematic context is Glenn Close’s bunny-boiling and the grisly antics in “Basic Instinct”, the real-life background is #MeToo. Given the imbalance between her and Samuel in age and status, Romy knows the liaison is risky or even wrong. “I genuinely believed that women with power would behave differently,” laments a colleague who rumbles the affair.

Ultimately, though, “Babygirl” glosses over these qualms. In a choice between exploring workplace ethics on one hand, and celebrating orgasms on the other, it plumps for the redemptive power of getting your rocks off. It takes sex seriously as an issue of self-expression but trivialises it as a political one. If the story has a feminist streak, it is mostly the personalised, sex-positive sort espoused by some younger people.

True, unlike the miscreants of #MeToo, Romy is a woman. She is only acting as countless entitled men have before her. You don’t, however, have to be a monster of the manosphere to wonder how much of a difference that ought to make to moral judgments. After all, some forms of parity are less desirable than others. When it comes to, say, their propensity to commit violent crimes or binge-drink, it would be good for men to cut back, less so for women to catch up.

“Babygirl” grants Romy another licence which, in the past, was overwhelmingly a male preserve. A powerful woman has a fling with a striving subordinate—and the audience is invited to cheer her liberation. You might call that role-swap a kind of equality or rough justice. You wouldn’t call it progress. ■