“Babygirl” Never Really Makes a Mess

In November, the reality star and entrepreneur Kim Kardashian posted a series of images and videos to her social-media accounts, in which she appeared to promote Tesla’s new A.I. robot, Optimus. In a video on X, captioned “Meet my new friend,” Kardashian is seen engaging with Elon Musk’s humanoid golem, which reportedly retails for around thirty thousand dollars, and whose metal torso is inscribed with the Tesla logo. “O.K., hi!” she says perkily, off camera, as she waves her manicured fingers just within frame—a motion that is immediately echoed by the robot. “Can you do this: ‘I love you’?” she asks next, forming a half heart with her hand, proffering it to the robot to urge him to complete the shape, and gasping in awe as he eagerly complies. But Optimus, who in the video seems more than happy to be at his mistress’s beck and call, appears less subservient in a series of pictures in which Kardashian, wearing spike heels and lingerie, poses beside him and a gold Tesla Cybercab. Seated in the vehicle with one silvered leg slung louchely out the open car door, the robot’s presence is now more menacing and eroticized, and his RoboCop-like facelessness throws Kardashian’s exposed flesh, in its own cyborgian, airbrushed perfection, into higher relief. Who’s the boss in this Cronenberg-in-Calabasas-style fantasy? Is it the woman, or is it the robot? And is there much of a difference between the two anymore?

My mind kept returning to Optimus as I watched “Babygirl,” the Dutch director Halina Reijn’s new film, which stars Nicole Kidman as Romy Mathis, the C.E.O. of a robotics company. In the movie, Romy is a middle-aged post-“Lean In” girlboss who seems, to almost everyone around her, to have it all. She is an esteemed leader in her field, a mentor to young women, a wearer of many delicious cream- and taupe-hued cashmere ensembles, and a resident of a gorgeous New York floor-through apartment and a stately country house. At home, she’s an attentive mother of two teen daughters and a longtime wife to Jacob (Antonio Banderas), an affectionate and hunky theatre director who is seemingly able to bring her to still-robust orgasm. Her frame is waspishly slim, and she has taut, nearly wrinkle-free skin, which she upkeeps with Botox and cold plunges.

Earlier in her career, Romy came up with a “warehouse-automation dream,” which, she explains, provides robotic solutions to “repetitive tasks, and give[s] people their time back.” (In the course of the film, Reijn occasionally includes satisfyingly seamless sequences of a warehouse devoid of humans, in which standardized packages are shuttled on automated tracks from one side of a floor to the other). Romy’s own time, meanwhile, is fully accounted for and maximized. She is not just in charge of a world of A.I. robotics; she herself is a kind of Optimus, if he were also a wife and mother, showing these machines who’s boss by besting them at their own game. “As more and more artificial intelligence is entering into the world, more and more emotional intelligence must enter into leadership,” she recites, quoting the author Amit Ray, in a corporate video for investors.

It turns out that Romy is missing one thing, however (and here come the spoilers): she has never actually managed to achieve an orgasm with Jacob, and has been convincingly faking them during their nineteen-year relationship. After sex, she runs to her laptop to masturbate to pornography, coming to the images and sounds of a woman being told what to do by a domineering-daddy type. During sex, she tries to pull a blanket over her head, then a pillow, asking her husband to touch her effectively faceless body. “I want to see you,” Jacob protests. “It makes me feel like a villain.” But Romy yearns to be treated villainously, like a package shuttled hither and thither at someone else’s whim, and there is one person, it emerges, who’s able to identify her unspoken desire.

This is Samuel, a hot young intern at Romy’s company, whom she first notices when he calms down a wild dog on the street outside the office by giving it a cookie. (“Do you want one?” he asks Romy later, cheekily.) Samuel (played with a loose-limbed insouciance by the excellent Harris Dickinson) can somehow tell that, far from being truly content with her boss role, Romy wants “to be told what to do,” and the two embark on a forbidden affair that includes lots of light kink, with Samuel variously directing Romy to crawl around on her hands and knees in sky-high heels and a pencil skirt, lap up milk from a dish, and, in their first sexual encounter, prostrate herself with her back to him on a hotel-room rug while he fiddles with her nether parts, unseen, and brings her to the rocking climax she’s been missing during all those years in which she’d been gazing into her husband’s eyes.

Romy’s desires seem to her to be out of control and animalistic. Still, she can’t resist their pull. Like Séverine, the secretly yearning ice-queen heroine of Luis Buñuel’s 1967 film “Belle de Jour,” she is beset by recurring fantasies of humiliation and abandon. She keeps flashing back, longingly, to the image of the wild dog that Samuel managed to tame, and to apparent memory snatches in which children are seen dancing rowdily, in a group. (Romy, as she explains to her assistant, “grew up in communes and cults,” a chaotic past that she has clearly done everything in her power to leave behind.) And yet, as I watched the movie, it seemed to me that the submission that Romy seeks is not really out of control nor animalistic but, instead, suggests an even more committed embrace of robotic optimization. “We need to set some rules that you and I both agree on. . . . I tell you what to do and you do it,” Samuel tells Romy, who ends up agreeing to this tenet, not unlike Musk’s robot whose fingers meet Kardashian’s to form the image of a heart. Unlike the implied sex in Kardashian’s case, however, here there is plenty of copulation, and of a particular sort. “I’m going to pee. I don’t want to pee!” Romy says, panicking as she nears orgasm in her first hotel-room encounter with Samuel. But it soon becomes clear there is no real danger of pee, or, in fact, of any other bodily fluids making a mess in this tidy movie. When Samuel inserts two fingers deep into Romy’s mouth, they emerge just barely moist. (“Do you work with the robots?” one of Romy’s daughters asks Samuel, about his role in the office. “Not directly,” he replies.)

Reijn has spoken about her interest in the great erotic thrillers of eighties and nineties Hollywood, and “Babygirl” stays self-consciously true to the glossy, handsome surfaces of movies such as Adrian Lyne’s “9½ Weeks” and Paul Verhoeven’s “Basic Instinct.” This makes for a fun, campy watch, reminiscent at times, too, of the sleek video clips of that era. (One scene in the movie is scored to INXS’s 1987 hit “Never Tear Us Apart,” another to George Michael’s ballad “Father Figure,” from the same year.) The twist Reijn enacts on these earlier texts is supposed to be Samuel’s youth, which knocks his masculine upper hand down a peg: though he’s the man in the coupling, he’s not an actual father figure but instead role-playing a daddy to make boss-lady Romy a “babygirl.” In a post-#MeToo-style corporate video playing on a screen at Romy’s company offices, a chipper narrator explains that “a respectful workplace is an efficient workplace,” and Romy, aware of the professional sway she holds over Samuel, parrots similar ass-covering platitudes when they meet. “You’re very young. I don’t want to hurt you,” she says, later adding, “I’m not gonna fire you.” Samuel, too, is keenly aware of his relative powerlessness. “I’m not something you can just pick up and play with,” he says, resentful that Romy’s desire to be objectified takes for granted his own objectified availability. And yet he also knows he’s holding a trump card. “I could make one call and you lose everything,” he tells her. Romy and Samuel’s relationship doesn’t explode any power structures, corporate or otherwise; it exists within them.

As I watched “Babygirl,” I kept thinking of “The Substance,” a recent movie also made by a European woman director, Coralie Fargeat, and starring a legendary middle-aged actress, Demi Moore. In the film, Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a faded TV fitness-show star, who enters into a Dorian Gray-style pact in order to maintain her youthfulness, with some very unfortunate consequences. The bodies and faces of Romy and Elisabeth are the visual spectacles at the center of both “Babygirl” and “The Substance,” but Romy’s presence is all about containment and Elisabeth’s is all about collapse. In “Babygirl,” we see Romy in front of her mirror, applying just the right amount of blush to armor herself for her day; in one of the more memorable scenes in “The Substance,” we see Elisabeth smearing her makeup wildly as her panic and self-loathing at her own aging reflection overcomes her.

In Fargeat’s film, this is a harbinger of the even more fantastic disintegration to come, with conventional femininity and all it implies—youth, beauty, sexual attractiveness—exploding into utter gore and mayhem. This is partly, of course, a matter of genre. Unlike “Babygirl,” “The Substance” is a horror movie. But, watching Reijn’s film, I did wish for a more violent detonation of Romy’s façade. I won’t give away the movie’s ending, but I will say that Romy, like a well-oiled machine, is able to place her more uncomfortable urges and fantasies in their appropriate track. (“Why don’t you fuck off, Sebastian,” she says to a work rival who tries to dominate her at the office. “If I want to be humiliated, I’m gonna pay someone to do it.”)

Admittedly, this outcome might be more honest than not. As I was writing this piece, I took a quick break to participate in an exercise practice called the Class that I’ve been taking online for the past several years. As its Web site explains, the Class is a “music-driven practice,” in which students are encouraged to express sound while enacting “repetitive cardio and strength-based exercises” that trigger “anything from physical sensations to unexpressed emotions.” And, though it has some New Age-y spiritual facets, the Class is also, like so much exercise, at least partly pursued to make one’s body look “better.” (As a friend of mine once said, “The Class: You do it for your ass.”) This time around, about thirty minutes into the session, the affirmations that an instructor named Sophia was calling out began to ring in my ears with a special resonance. “We’re going to play with it. Just a short and sweet moment,” she said. “Be in service of yourself. . . . Let it feel like an explosion. . . . This is you. This is the most authentic you right here.” As I struggled through a series of squats, then burpees, then jumping jacks, it struck me that this moment of yearned-for explosion, of yearned-for authenticity, would soon be over, and I would be back at my desk, working, because I, too, was a sort of Optimus. Tell me to get on my knees, tell me to stand up and do jumping jacks, tell me to sit down and write—all of this, it turns out, is what makes for a woman who’s in charge. ♦