Not since Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut has a female movie star offered such an awkward portrayal of sex as Nicole Kidman in Babygirl. The movie is meant to be daring, a Last Tango in Paris for our time, but its essential premise would work in a Douglas Sirk production: A sexually frustrated, long-married woman accepts her fate until a stranger comes to town and puts everything at risk.
What Kidman-as Romy, the CEO of a soulless corporation-dreams of and seeks out in online pornography is the experience of being sexually dominated. Not the most obscure of sexual fantasies, but for the movie to work we must understand this kind of sex as so shocking, so unnatural, that we are being given a privileged glimpse at something few decent people have seen before.
Romy's life and world are sketched out in the first act in a way that makes her seem like an alien, but we are apparently meant to see her as an ideal. She's married to the wonderful Jacob, played by Antonio Banderas, who has been fulfilling sexual fantasies for more than 30 years.
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