Babygirl

18 | ★★★★✩

When in 1998 Nicole Kidman starred in the stage play The Blue Room, a modern version of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1920 erotic masterpiece La Ronde, one critic famously described the result as “theatrical Viagra”. Plus ça change. A quarter of a century later a similar fuss is being made of the sex scenes in Kidman’s latest movie. Described by some as “explicit” the camera in director Halina Reijn’s tense erotic thriller lingers mostly on Kidman’s face when her character nears and then reaches sexual release. It is called acting, the fusspots apparently need reminding. And good acting it is too, not just in this sense but throughout this engrossing film.

Kidman plays powerful, married corporate executive Romy who appears to have it all. Her husband (Antonio Banderas) is a successful theatre director, their teenage daughters are complicated and interesting and her professional life is meteoric. Yet Romy’s sex life is not all she needs it to be.

This absence of satisfaction becomes impossible to ignore when new intern Samuel (an excellent Harris Dickinson) shows none of the deference that people at the bottom of the ladder are expected to show to those at the top. It is as if he detects that Romy craves a transference of power. Workplace etiquette and the executive’s authority crumble when they are in each other’s company. The scene in a cheap hotel where the affair begins is superbly observed and charged with the risk and hesitancy that goes with fulfilling long-suppressed desire.

When Samuel turns up at Romy’s home and meets her family Reijn’s script appears to be barrelling towards Basic Instinct territory. Yet whereas that film was a moral cautionary tale about the price of following your desires, this one plies the much more interesting lesson that we suppress them at our peril.

Reijn also shows a generation gap. Romy and her peers may be running the corporations but they are powerless in the face of the Generation Zeds who are writing the rules of 21st- century life. When Banderas’s Jacob dismisses Romy’s sexual needs as trivial self-indulgence the response that he is dated is both brutal and final.