Editor’s Note: The following story contains some spoilers for “Babygirl,” now in theaters.
Nicole Kidman and writer/director Halina Reijn take a leap of faith into the (hopefully) orgasmic unknown with their new film “Babygirl,” about buttoned-up CEO Romy’s (Kidman) affair with her 25-year-old intern, Samuel (Harris Dickinson).
The Christmas Day A24 release features a daring — and Venice Volpi Cup-winning — performance from Kidman as a woman who grew up in a free-thinking cult, only to emerge into a kinkless, corporatized world repressing her hardly straight-and-narrow desires and tucking away her secret, singularly weird self. The other gaping void in the room? Romy has never had an orgasm with her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), with whom she shares two daughters. Enter Samuel with a pocketful of dog treats and an enthusiasm for indulging Romy’s desire to be dominated, and Romy is free-falling into a potentially destructive affair.
“The whole movie is basically about, on the one hand, I want to be normal, I want to be the woman you like, I want to be a white-picket fence, I want to be a robot. I don’t want to be strange and awkward and weird and authentic. And then, on the other hand, all I want is to be authentic. That kind of conflict in any human being — where you want to do what society expects you to do, but yet you want to be your strange and unique self — that is at the core of this movie,” writer/director Reijn told IndieWire in a recent interview. “We take sexuality as a metaphor for that. Sexuality is something we are all obsessed with that is the reason we are, but that also is surrounded by shame, especially in the straight world.”
Dutch filmmaker Reijn, known first as an actress in films like Paul Verhoeven’s lurid World War II espionage thriller “Black Book” and Bryan Singer’s “Valkyrie” before directing “Instinct” and “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” comes from a European tradition where intimacy coordinators are rarely brought onto set as they are in the States. Or else, they’re outright derided.
She loved collaborating with Lizzy Talbot (a veteran intimacy coordinator who also worked on “It Ends with Us” and “Bridgerton”) to facilitate the fetishistic (but never tasteless) love scenes between Kidman and Dickinson as their characters embark on a runaway train of an age-gap tryst at the office, in a seedy Lower Manhattan hotel room, and, eventually, at Romy’s upstate getaway home. One moment involves Dickinson smashing up china and making Romy grovel on the floor to pick up the pieces. It’s hot stuff in a movie that’s actually light on intercourse, but even so, those scenes demanded a more thoughtful approach than on some of her past credits as an actor.
“I’ve been an actress, so I’ve experienced a lot of men sitting in high chairs with North Face jackets, eating pizzas while I was crawling around like a turtle on my back. And I hated that feeling,” she said. “I thought, ‘What the fuck are you doing in that chair?’ I would feel sometimes the enjoyment of that power, and them saying — this is all before #MeToo — ‘just try something,’ where there wasn’t [anything] even on paper or in the choreography, nothing. What’s so scary about that is you don’t know what the boundaries of your scene partner are… it’s incredibly traumatizing. I’m obsessed with intimacy coordinators. I’m in love with them, not only on set but what they can do with your writing. If you use them in the right way, they are just as useful as a stunt coordinator and just as important. I wish I had one as an actress, but unfortunately, they were nowhere to be seen.”
Reijn said that if an actor asks, she will act out a sex scene for her cast “so they can see it, and they can see my body doing it, and then they get reassured because they can actually look at it. They can feel they are sitting in that high chair in the North Face jacket eating pizza while I am going through the motions.”
Unlike, say, Luca Guadagnino, who leaves the room during a sex scene, Reijn likes to really get in there with her actors. And in a moment where the role of intimacy coordinators and actors’ complicity in having them on set at all is under scrutiny, Reijn said, “You can get more extreme sex scenes that look way more risky than when you’re thinking ‘no, let the actresses find out themselves.’ That’s such a dated idea of what sexuality is and how to approach it. I really am against it. I’m also against people who are saying, ‘No, my actors didn’t want an intimacy coordinator.’ That makes no sense. It is also for your safety as a director and for everyone. What if there is a misunderstanding? It’s just amazing to have a person like that on set. And if you are creative and talented enough of a director, you can pull it off. Trust me. You just have to go a little bit through your own discomfort and then you will discover a whole new world of creativity and possibilities.”
In one of “Babygirl’s” kinkiest scenes, Samuel, giving sly new meaning to “I saw you from across the bar…,” sends Romy not a drink but a glass of milk, and orders her to drink it. She does so dutifully. Just as the concept of “Babygirl” is based on a friend of Reijn’s “who was in a 25-year marriage and had never had an orgasm with her husband,” the viral milk scene came from the director’s own experience.
“The milk is, of course, an archetype. We’ve seen it in other movies. It is a great symbol of animalistic sides of ourselves. It happened to me,” she said. “I was playing in Belgium onstage, and I got offstage, and I had a really good run, and I was like, ‘Oh my god!’ I felt really good about myself for one night in my life. All my colleagues were like, ‘No, we’re going to bed.’ They’re all boring. I was all alone. I went to a bar, and I ordered something boring like a Diet Coke because I didn’t drink at that time because I was a control freak. There was this young Belgian actor — I can’t say who it is — but he was famous. I knew of him. I’d never spoken to him. He was at least 15 years younger than I, and he ordered me a glass of milk. I thought it was an incredible, hot thing to do, and so courageous, and so I wanted to reward him by drinking the whole thing, and I did. It did make me a little nauseated, to be honest with you, because it was cow milk. It was back in the day.”
She said that the actor never, unfortunately, said “good girl to me” as Samuel does. “I wish he did. He just walked out. I didn’t have sex with him or anything. But when I was writing, I did think that was one of the most arousing moments of my life. There wasn’t even touching. That is what fascinates me about sex. To me, real, shocking sex is often not at all two bodies banging into each other. To me, real, shocking sex is about what is in the mind. It’s all suggestion. It’s all imagination. [Romy] crawling around on a dirty carpet with stains and licking a little bit of candy out of his hand, and him petting her like she’s an animal, that, to me, is really sexy. Real sex acts to me onscreen are quite boring, which is why we only have two short moments of that.”
Even more daring, perhaps, than seeing Nicole Kidman bare next to all in the film‘s steamy S&M moments is the actress in a montage undergoing cryotherapy, light therapy, Botox, and more as part of her control-freak morning routine. The sequence inadvertently or not plays with Kidman’s own physicality as a celebrity who probably does some version of the same. So does Reijn.
“I didn’t write [‘Babygirl’] at all with [Nicole Kidman] in mind just simply for the reason that I thought she never would’ve done this script. I was a farmer from the Netherlands. I never thought I could work with her,” Reijn said. “I wrote it with myself in mind in all the parts. Also the dog. Also Antonio Banderas. Not because I want to play them but because that’s my way of writing. Myself, I have a lot of struggles. I still use Botox. I use fillers. I always think I’m not pretty enough. I always think I look insane and need to look less like a clown and more like Cindy Crawford. I’m completely stuck in my own vanity and fear around that subject. If I’m writing a script about aging and the fact that we’re all going to die… that needs to be part of it.”
Reijn, who lives in New York, said she moved to America and discovered that “every fucking corner of every street has a longevity clinic… I wanted that all in my movie. I wanted to bring radical honesty to ‘what does it mean to be a woman right now? What does it mean to be aging in this day and age where we all think we need to look like Kim Kardashian?’ Nicole never spoke one word about it. She just played all the scenes, and there was never one issue. We didn’t even discuss that scene. I only talked about this character as wanting to be perfect, the perfect mother, the perfect leader, the perfect lover, and that included all these forms of therapy to perfect herself. And she just said, ‘Oh yeah, great.’”
Part of Romy’s routine is undergoing EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) therapy, which is somewhat controversial in the psychiatric field as a novel mental health treatment, to process her childhood trauma growing up in a cult, where she was named by a guru. That also came from Reijn’s personal experience of being raised in the tiny Dutch village of Wildervank.
“I grew up with very radical hippie parents. They were part of a spiritual movement called Subud. It’s pretty big in L.A. I was named by a guru. I didn’t grow up inside a cult living with other people, but I was raised very much in an environment that was closed off to the world. We didn’t have magazines or TV. I grew up very free without any boundaries,” she said. “I did do EMDR therapy in a hospital… When I was doing it, I couldn’t help but think, ‘Oh my god, this is amazing for a movie.’ The whole experience, the craziness of the headphones, the wristbands, the light thing that goes back and forth, it’s such a weird situation and cinematically so interesting. It was developed for soldiers who came back from the war and were traumatized. For me, there were certain elements of my childhood that were very extreme, and I wanted to process that.”
It all goes back to Romy’s endless drive toward needing to be perfect. “I need to have Botox. I need to sit in ice baths. I need to sit in oxygen chambers, and I need to do any form of therapy to kill the demon and to become this Mary Poppins kind of figure,” Reijn said, speaking on her character. “Then, my husband will love me and then I will feel normal. And she is not at ease with being different. She’s not at ease with her own beast. And so my movie is a warning. What happens if you do that instead of accepting and loving yourself, including your ugly, shameful, flawed sides?”
“Babygirl” is now in theaters from A24.
