Nicole Kidman naked
As she did for Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut in 1999, Nicole Kidman lends herself to the erotic thriller game in Babygirl. She was then 32 years old; she is now 57. This question of a woman’s desire for a younger man – which we have already seen treated so often in the other direction – seems to work for the actress. It was in fact already the pitch for the disastrous romantic comedy The Underside of the Family on Netflix, where she seduced Zack Efron. We were on the comedy side. This is not the case here…
Nicole Kidman agrees to strip naked to portray a woman refusing to age, imposing physical treatments on herself to stay young, including botox injections. The opportunity for the Australian actress to play with her own image…
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Revealed as an actress in Black Book by Paul Verhoeven in 2006, reviewed in Valkyrie by Bryan Singer two years later or in his own series Red Light in 2020, the Dutch Halina Reijn turned to directing in 2019 with Instinct. A prison psychological thriller that is ambiguous to say the least, faithful to Verhoeven. Before signing, in the United States, the horror film Bodies Bodies Bodies in 2022.
Exploration of unspeakable desires
As in InstinctReijn explores here the mechanisms of female desire. And this through an analogous character. Her first feature film featured a prison psychologist beginning a relationship with a dangerous inmate. This Babygirl is once again a woman of power attracted by danger. This is summed up by the meeting scene between the two protagonists. While Romy risks being attacked by a dog, Samuel manages to calm the hound. Enough to titillate the desire of the fifty-year-old. Even more so when the intern is very bold towards his boss…
“Instinct”, an intense and ambiguous psychological thriller set in a prison setting
-Multiplying the torrid scenes (but soft, the filmmaker focusing mainly on Kidman’s ecstatic face), Halina Reijn manages to create trouble, by offering the portrait of a woman finally deciding to assume her deepest desires of submission and humiliation. However, we are far from Fifty Shades of Gray. What interests the Dutchwoman is not cheap Hollywood eroticism. Babygirl digs deeper into the psychology of its heroine, trying as much as possible to reject the moral question. In the same way that Paul Verhoeven achieved, in a much more ambiguous and uncomfortable way, in Elle in 2016, with Isabelle Huppert. The Frenchwoman obviously found herself in the choice of Nicole Kidman. Last September, his jury awarded him the acting prize at the 81st Venice Film Festival.
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It’s a shame though that Halina Reijn doesn’t completely manage to maintain her “Verhoevenian” course. Particularly in a rather unsuccessful erotic sequence with music, where we return to a very Hollywood romantic vision of this story of submission. Whereas, even if the filmmaker lands on her feet at the very end of her film, Babygirl sinned by a last act which turns into a grand-guignolesque boulevard theater…
Babygirl Erotic thriller Screenplay and direction Halina Reijn Photography Jasper Wolf Musique Cristobal Tapia de Veer Montage Matthew Hannam With Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas, Sophie Wilde… Duration 1h54
