QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM VENICE

It all starts as a watered-down, vanilla-flavoured take on Michael Haneke’s masterpiece The Piano Teacher (2001). A woman in a position of power and status begins a masochistic affair with one of her subordinates, but her fantasies are just too twisted and perverse for the young man to take. On this occasion, the mighty female is called Romy (Nicole Kidman), the CEO of a warehouse automation business, and her lover is her irresistible intern Samuel (played by British heartthrob Harris Dickinson, from Ruben Ostlund’s 2022 Triangle of Sadness).

Romy’s non-conventional sexuality is exposed in the movie’s very first scene. After having beautiful and intense – however unsatisfactory – sex with her loving husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas), Romy jumps onto to her laptop in the room next door and masturbates to daddy porn. The formidable woman – widely respected and admired at work for her meteoric career and stern demeanour – finds sexual pleasure in being submissive. That’s precisely the behaviour she’s not allowed at work, where she must be in firm control of every aspect of the business. She has a subversive libido. In other words, she is only able to reach an orgasm in situations which are anathema to her public persona. Non-conventional sex practices are a venting outlet for a life not as fulfilling as it may seem.

Romy treats Sam with sheer arrogance and disdain. That’s all part of the game she set out to play. She wants him to challenge and humiliate her. She finds risk particularly arousing: Romy gets horny at the possibility that she may get caught, having her career and family instantly destroyed. At first, the young man is a little uncomfortable. He gradually begins to play along, and the relationship develops into something more multifaceted. Romy kneels down, gets on all fours, strips on cue, nearly urinates while being masturbated, and drinks milk from a saucer (à la George Galloway, in a scene as cringeworthy as the one starred by the British politician in real life).

Now on her third feature film, Dutch actress-turned-director Halina Reijn empathises with her rogue protagonist. The realisation that society is unprepared to embrace Romy’s sexual deviance is a moment of heartbreak for the Kidman’s character and viewers alike. She is forced to keep up the masquerade of the infallible superwoman, when in reality her vulnerabilities are corroding her livelihood. Not even her daughter – a beautiful teen fully enjoying free love with two women of around her age – is able to comprehend her, instead pitying and even worrying about her mother. Her husband shudders at the idea of very basic sadomasochistic play. Is there anyone out there who could lend randy Romy a little hand?

Those expecting graphic and sweaty sex, relying on the promise of Venice’s Artistic Director Antonio Barbera that 2024 marks the return of eroticism (including “extreme sex”) to cinema, are in for a major disappointment. The sex scenes are extremely timid, the interaction is hardly realistic there is no frontal nudity (except for a terrified Kidman covering her modesty for a split second). There is absolutely nothing risqué, audacious or even innovative.

Babygirl isn’t The Piano Teacher, or even Julia Ducournau’s filthy Titane (2021). This is an American movie catering for sensibilities of Hollywood audiences, designed to please the fans of Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades of Grey (2015). And as such, the movie offers a clearcut takeaway, and some vaguely comforting redemption. It is okay to be sexually deviant. Women into dirty games are neither monsters nor predators. They deserve love and recognition of their needs, like everyone else. This is a movie that sets out to liberate subversive women. Sadly, the very final resolution keeps them firmly imprisoned instead.

Babygirl just premiered in the Official Competition of the 81st Venice International Film Festival.