Nicole Kidman ‘had no rules, no limitations’: Babygirl director breaks down the hottest film of the holidays | Canada Voices

An erotic thriller from a female point of view – Babygirl is that simple, and that complicated. Halina Reijn, the Dutch actor turned writer/director (her previous English-language film, Bodies Bodies Bodies, was a tongue-in-cheek slasher comedy), understands why women respond to male-gaze fantasies like 9 ½ Weeks, Indecent Proposal, Damage and Presumed Innocent. More importantly, she understands why their purring, either too passive or too femme-fatale heroines left her…unsatisfied.

“The story is about my own struggles with and confusion about being a woman right now,” Reijn, 49, said in an interview during last September’s Toronto International Film Festival. She was wearing a fitted tan dress; her long dark hair spilled over her shoulders, and she leaned into every sentence, speaking animated English with a Dutch accent.

“Being a woman now feels impossible,” she says. “I find motherhood very extreme. Whether you have children or not, you can never do it right. And the pressure of being a perfect mother and having a perfect career is insane. We think we have to be perfect mothers, spouses, workers, daughters, sisters. We forget to ask, ‘What do we want?’ We completely forget that. And we wonder, ‘Is it possible for me to love and accept all parts of myself, not just the ones I present to the world?’ And the movie is not answering any questions.” She bursts out laughing.

Nicole Kidman plays Romy, a CEO who believes in nurturing; a mother who tucks notes into her two daughters’ lunch bags; a devotee of pussy-bow blouses and Botox; a loving wife to her devoted husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas); and a seething mass of insecurities, unarticulated desires, and fantasies that thrill and shame her in equal measure.

Until, that is, a cocky young intern in her office, Samuel (Harris Dickinson in a star-making turn), chastises her about drinking coffee after lunch. The see-sawing, dominant-submissive affair they fall into frees her to finally admit what she wants – and scares the hell out of her, because the only way out of her painstakingly constructed prison might be to blow it all up.

“The narrative is that this is a movie about sex. To me it’s a movie about a woman in an existential crisis,” Reijn says. “If you look at human history, women have barely just gotten the right to vote. We’ve barely started to explore who we are. So I wrote a woman in midlife, only now finding out what she desires, and slowly allowing herself to talk about that.

“You will see a glimpse of Hedda Gabler in there, a character who destroys herself,” Reijn continues. “But it’s not about Romy’s husband not being there for her. That’s why it was important for me to cast Antonio, a masculine, strong, beautiful, amazing, warm man. It’s about a woman not being there for herself.”

An actress and novelist before becoming a writer/director, Reijn set out to write “the juiciest, most layered part I could imagine for an actress, about a woman who is powerful, who fears aging, who wants to be a little girl, who is playing all these different characters in one character, because that is what women do all day long.” She had Kidman in mind, “because she’s the ultimate one. The ultimate one! When I was acting and afraid to go on stage, I would always channel her in the wings, because of her courage. When she said she wanted to do it, wow.”

Romy wears elegant gowns and also lets loose at a rave; she crawls to Samuel on her knees and also sits back in a hotel robe and watches him dance shirtless for her. Kidman was game for every bit, Reijn says: “She seemed to be hungry to play a part in which she could show her range and put all her emotion.” As an actress, Reijn found rehearsing embarrassing; instead, she and Kidman spent time talking through each scene and its themes.

“Nicole does these big movies, and we only had 34 days, we were moving so fast, improvising,” Reijn says. “But she had no rules, no limitations. She was the one who, if I would doubt myself, would urge me to operate from a place of courage, not fear.”

Once Kidman signed on, the search for Samuel began. “We needed to find someone young but strong enough to match Nicole,” Reijn says. “Because if she didn’t feel his strength she wouldn’t go all the way, she’d hold back. Samuel is a different generation than Romy, more at ease. A man’s man, strong and honest with himself, who can also be vulnerable, almost Peter Pan. Because he’s also exploring what being a man is. My movie is not only about the female struggle, but who are men supposed to be right now – and who are they supposed to be to us?”

The minute she met with Dickinson, Reijn knew he was the one. Then Kidman bumped into him at an event, and immediately texted her director, “This is going to work.”

Now, about that shirtless dance. Back when her script was just vague ideas, Reijn knew George Michael’s song Father Figure would be in it. (“That’s all I wanted/Something special, something sacred…For just one moment/To be bold and naked.”) “It’s about trying to hold everything up, solve everyone’s problems, but underneath, just wanting to be held,” she says. “To have a younger man dance to that for an older woman with power – I was playing with the archetype of Mickey Rourke in 9 ½ Weeks. Because of course Samuel has the power, too.” Only once have I seen a male director film a man like that: Ridley Scott, shooting Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise. And we all know how that turned out for Pitt.

The film’s score, by Emmy-winning composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer (The White Lotus, Utopia), includes another song that speaks to Reijn, Wolves. “So many women, they’re keeping every ball up in the air, and underneath the beast is growing,” she says. “But they don’t get any space to talk to their own beast. Again, I don’t have any answers, I just want to show that. And I hope that women will feel less alone when they see it.”