Git exactly what you wantHalina Reijns’ trailer promised Baby girl. Escaping my miserable existence for two hours seemed like a great idea, so off I went.
What I got: an off-leash dog that symbolizes the beast within. A mother kisses her child on the forehead. People laughing and running from the dance floor to a quieter area. A CEO who looks at Excel files so that we understand that she is doing something smart. Nicole Kidman holding a hand over her mouth when she needs to cum silently. And who, in another scene, has been instructed to think of a grizzly bear growling, because that’s what a woman really sounds like when she comes.
Reijn was “super nervous” whether the film would be well received by the audience because, she told the VPRO, has “quite a strange sense of humor.”
I distrust people who define their own humor, whether it’s dark, sarcastic, or weird. Most of the time it’s not that bad. In reviews of and podcasts about Baby girl the same example was always given: CEO Romy, played by Kidman, uses botox and when she comes home after a few invigorating injections, one of her daughters shouts: “You look like a dead fish!” Humor, fine, but strange, no.
Also funny would be the ‘human bumbling’ during sex. It’s slowly becoming tiring, that eternal applause whenever human clumsiness is depicted somewhere again. We’ve broken it all down clearly: for beautiful, streamlined sex, go to Pornhub, and in the cinema we only do realistic (and apparently that automatically means: clumsy) sex. For example, in the form of Romy shouting that she has to pee while she is being fingered (“I don’t want to pee!”).
I simply can’t imagine anyone being surprised by a scene like that anymore. And that it sometimes happens that way in real life, that’s fine, but who cares? Sell me another fairy tale.
With or without urinating, the fact is that Romy can have an orgasm with the younger intern who forces her to drink milk, something the dorky husband (Antonio Banderas, with that Spanish accent, while holding Kidman’s head with both hands after sex: „I love you…I love you.“) but can’t get it done. What now? The affair comes out, you can’t escape it, the gentlemen fight and the intern disappears from the picture.
The husband has learned that he must accommodate Romy’s sexual desires to save the marriage. In the final scene he puts his hand over her eyes (wedding ring in the picture), but with such tenderness that it seems as if he is blocking a child’s view of a prostitute. Now Romy can have a nice orgasm, while she still thinks about the intern. Incredible, as is the suggestion that a husband with that appearance and temperament – just look at him rant when Romy confesses to cheating – would never feel like having anything other than cozy ‘I love you’ sex. The man is a stage director after all.
“You have Baby girl Seen it too?”, a friend texted me this week. So yes. And compulsively read all the interviews, all the reviews.
I didn’t like the two flavors in which the criticism has divided: the jubilant reviews on the one hand and the bloodless opinion pieces about the feminist content on the other. You’re all crazy, I thought, wild with frustration.
“Yes,” I texted back. “What did you think?” I held my breath.
“A monstrosity,” she replied.
If you have already given up hope, unity is a great comfort.
Tessa Sparreboom is a Dutch scholar and former editor of Propria Cures.