Nicole Kidman reverses her image as a glamorous star in Babygirl, a new generation erotic thriller in theaters Wednesday, which renews a genre made outdated by feminist struggles.
At 57 years old, the actress of Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and Moulin Rouge (2001), who has never left the screens, is exposed as rarely in this new role, which earned her the prize of best actress at the Venice Film Festival.
She plays a New York tech tycoon having a sultry affair with a young intern, who leads her into a soft SM game. Few stars of his fame appear, as in one of the film’s few erotic scenes, naked on screen, or giving botox injections.
“It’s a film about desire, pleasure, inner flaws, secrecy, marriage, truth, power and consent,” summarized Kidman during the presentation of the film in Venice.
“It’s a woman’s story and I hope it’s liberating. It’s narrated by a woman (Dutch director and screenwriter Halina Reijn) and through her female perspective, that’s what makes it so unique to me. »
The only downside to this picture of a “strong woman”: her sex life with her husband, a theater director played by Antonio Banderas, 64 years old.
She does not enjoy with him and has never dared to talk to him about it, the film playing on the image of two Hollywood icons: Kidman, glamorous red carpet figure, and Banderas, virile sex symbol.
She meets a young intern (Harris Dickinson, 28, discovered in Without Filter, the 2022 Palme d’Or), with whom she begins an affair and who leads 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.
Halina Reijn is herself a former actress who worked with Paul Verhoeven (in Black Book).
The genre had a heyday in cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, from Basic Instinct to Fatal Liaison via 9 1/2 Weeks, with men behind the camera most of the time, but has become a bit dated in the wake of the #MeToo movement.
The question of the representation of sex in cinema has become hot, often at the instigation of female directors.
The stories began to diversify, in the wake of films like Portrait of a Girl on Fire by Céline Sciamma on female desire and the female gaze, as did filming practices, with the now systematic use of coordinators in the United States. of intimacy, on this film too.
Nicole Kidman spoke of how filming with a female director allowed her to create closeness, while the filmmaker insisted on representing pleasure from a female point of view.
The film reverses some patterns on male/female relationships and plays on the gaps between generations. Without shaking the totems of family and marriage, sacred in Hollywood.
Francois BECKER/AFP
Nicole Kidman reverses her image as a glamorous star in Babygirl, a new generation erotic thriller in theaters on Wednesday, which renews a genre made outdated by feminist struggles. At 57, the actress of Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and Moulin Rouge ( 2001), who has never left the screens, is exposed as rarely in this new role, which earned her the prize for best actress…
- -
