At 57, the actress from Eyes Wide Shut exposes herself like rarely in “Babygirl”, an erotic thriller presented at the Venice Film Festival in which a tech magnate has an affair with her intern.
Nicole Kidman made her debut in competition on Friday in Venice in Babygirl, an erotic thriller that aims to renew a genre made outdated by feminist struggles.
At 57, the actress from Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and Moulin Rouge (2001) who has never left the screens exposes herself as rarely. Few stars of her fame appear, as in one of the few erotic scenes of the film, naked on screen, or having botox injections.
In this Babygirl, she plays a New York tech tycoon who is successful in everything. The only shadow in this picture of a “strong woman” is her sex life with her husband, a theater director played by Antonio Banderas, 64.
She doesn’t enjoy it with him and has never dared to talk to him about it – the film plays on the image of two Hollywood icons: Nicole Kidman, glamorous figure of the red carpet, and Antonio Banderas, virile sex symbol.
A film about desire
She meets a young intern (Harris Dickinson, 28, discovered in Sans filtre, the Palme d’or 2022), with whom she begins an affair and who draws her into a soft SM game.
Enough to plunge her into a deep existential crisis when she discovers that she likes to be dominated. And jeopardize her career and her home, because the intern threatens to blackmail her.
“It’s a film about desire, pleasure, inner flaws, secrecy, marriage, truth, power and consent,” Nicole Kidman summed up in Venice. “It’s a woman’s story and I hope it’s liberating. It’s told by a woman (director and screenwriter Halina Reijn), and through her female gaze, that’s what makes it so unique to me.”
Little known as a director, the filmmaker, selected for the first time in a major festival, is herself a former actress who worked with Paul Verhoeven (in Black Book).
The “beast” in us
“Men or women, we all have a beast in us, a part of good and a part of bad,” explained the director, who wanted to renew the erotic thriller.
Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson in the erotic thriller “Babygirl” © A24
The genre was a major success in cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, from Basic Instinct to Fatal Attraction and 9 1/2 Weeks, with most of the time men behind the camera, but has aged in the wake of the #MeToo movement.
The issue of the representation of sex in cinema has become a hot topic, often driven by female directors. The stories have begun to diversify, in the wake of films such as Portrait of a Lady on Fire by Céline Sciamma on desire and the female gaze, as have filming practices, with the now systematic use in the United States of intimacy coordinators, on this film too.
Nicole Kidman spoke about how working with a female director helped her build a connection, while the filmmaker insisted on representing pleasure from a female perspective.
Breaking the Hollywood Straitjacket
The film reverses some patterns on male/female relationships and plays on the gaps between generations, but ultimately breaks few taboos, mainly pushing open doors on masturbation or pleasure, without touching the totems of family and marriage, sacred in Hollywood.
It suffers from a script that is often predictable and scenes that border on a poorly reheated Fifty Shades of Grey. Babygirl is nevertheless part of a line of films selected at festivals, which are gradually helping to change the standards of cinema.
Last year, the Golden Lion was awarded to Poor Creatures, shot by Yorgos Lanthimos but practically made by a four-handed collaboration with its actress Emma Stone, who much more frankly broke the constraints of Hollywood modesty, by painting the portrait of a woman who takes control of her pleasure.
The question is at the heart of the remake of the erotic classic Emmanuelle, directed by Audrey Diwan, which will open the San Sebastian Festival (Spain) before its release in France on September 25.
