Nicole Kidman stars in a timid movie about sex and power: NPR

Ever since silent movie audiences fell in love with Rudolph Valentino and bad girl Theda Barra, movies have been loaded with sexual invective. But filmmakers have always struggled with dealing with sex head-on. There are plenty of “hot” love scenes, but movies about sexual desire almost always feel fake: exploitative, moralistic, or unintentionally funny. Even Stanley Kubrick was instrumental in making Eyes Wide Shut, a dreamlike film in which Tom Cruise wakes up haunted by the possibility of his wife, played by Nicole Kidman, being unfaithful.

We enter a similar dreamland with Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn’s new film Baby Girl. The film boasts a thrillingly insane performance by Kidman, the bravest and most risk-taking actress of all time. Set during the seemingly never-ending Christmas season, Babygirl begins with the classic cliché of the talented career woman secretly yearning for sexual submission to men, then turns it into a bizarre fantasy of empowerment. It’s changing.

Kidman plays Romy Mathis, the CEO of a high-tech shipping company in New York. She has a country house, two cool daughters, and a very attractive husband, Jacob, played by Antonio Banderas. But, and this is crucial, their sex life never worked out for Romy. Married for 19 years, she fakes luxurious orgasms and secretly satisfies herself while watching risqué domination porn.

Everything changes when, on his way to work one morning, he witnesses a striking young man, played by Harris Dickinson, taming a large, unruly dog. As if in a dream, this impressionable young man soon appears at the company’s office as a new intern, Samuel.

While mumbling and aggressive like a 50s method actor, Samuel somehow sees right through Romy’s raging psyche. Their early meetings always had a sexual aspect, and Samuel found Romy fantasizing about being told what to do.

She resists his inappropriate forwardness at first, but she knows it’s only a matter of time since she is strictly forbidden from interacting with interns. After a little verbal sparring, he has Romy carry out his orders in the bedroom. He calls her “baby girl” and helps her achieve the pleasure she has been waiting for.

Given the unusual dynamics of this relationship (she’s his boss at work, he’s hers in bed), Babygirl promises a boldly adult perspective on both sexuality and power. Masu. But despite the initial buzz about the film being “subversive,” I was struck by how tame, to use the buzzword, the film was. Even though Romy says she needs sexual danger, her desires never take her or the film to any truly dark or 50 shades of grey.

To her credit, Laine makes a point of not trying to antagonize us. She doesn’t embrace any of the laughable nudie vulgarity of films like 9 1/2 Weeks, for example. But so obsessed with Romy’s inner life that Kidman heroically depicts its pulses and flickers, she makes the classic Hollywood mistake of neglecting everything else. First of all, we have no idea who Samuel actually is or what he wants.

This is important in the film where both Romy and Samuel keep using the word “force”. Romy may be running a company, but she’s also an HR nightmare. Samuel could ruin her career with a few well-chosen words. I kept waiting to find out what Samuel wanted and what difficult choices their dangerous relationship would force her to make. That’s exactly what happens in Catherine Breyer’s brilliant new film, Last Summer. In this film, another successful middle-aged woman commits a far greater crime than Romy and then brutally fights her way out of the mess.

There is no such calculation here. Issues of power are raised in the film, as Rain is very keen not to punish Romy for his sexual preference, but only to fend them off. Babygirl’s problem isn’t Romy’s desire to be dominated. It makes her erotic liberation so triumphant that the story’s sexual politics don’t matter.

All of this feels out of sync with the post-MeToo era. After all, if a male CEO had kinky sex with a young female intern, I don’t think modern audiences would give him a pass just because she made him happier than his wife in bed.