The past few of years have been marred with a kind of weightlessness. There have been and continue to be people who joke about still feeling stuck in 2019, how it doesn't feel as though it was 6 years ago at all, how it's hard to feel present when time feels like it's constantly being stolen from us. Not just pandemic-wise, but spending most of our lives working jobs we don't like or in bus stations, waiting to get to those jobs or pretty much just anywhere that isn't with people who value us beyond what labour we can provide for them.
As a result, I have formed some theories about why I seek out things I know will disturb me or piss me off. In my abandoned blog post on disturbing media I attempted to write a couple of years ago, I argued that affect is very grounding and that taking the cultural litmus test of what you can and can't endure keeps you assimilated to a certain extent, even if it's based on having an overly negative reaction to a taboo topic. Seeming uncool, contrarian or prudish actually does have a lot of mileage in a landscape constantly looking for dissenting opinions to align yourself with or, even better, to dunk on.
With this in mind, I wish I was able to report particularly strong feelings about Babygirl (2024). Maybe I needed something deeply troubling or raunchy or offensive to knock me out of my apathetic mundanity. To a certain extent, I would have liked to have been taken aback by a film whose marketing threatened to shake up discourse about sex in cinema. Instead, I have come to realise that this film is simply the memefied, somewhat middling aesthetic exercise of the month and not much more.
Romy is the leader of a tech company and, from the outside, seems as though she has everything she could ever want - a flourishing and empathy-led business, a beautiful family and a doting husband. She is however haunted by her own sexual desire and worse than that, is unable to articulate this desire outside of the language of shame and loathing. This culminates in her repeatedly faking orgasms, hyper-fixating on her beauty routine and keeping her phone glued to her eyes anytime anyone attempts to penetrate her icy forcefield. Enter Samuel, a new intern at her company, who pretty much immediately senses something is off about her and begins to test her boundaries by giving her orders and rewarding her submission. Thus begins an illicit, temperamental but ultimately fulfilling affair that allows her to escape her reality.
A recurring thought that kept coming to me (in my attempt to be biting I guess) was that it’s very funny when people who have never worked in an office try to write about working in an office. It's artists trying to comment on the sexlessness of modern labour with none of the specifity. Unfortunately, this thought pulled at a thread that bothered me – Babygirl wants to utilise the built-in power dynamics of an office but has no clue what to do with them.
It’s initially compelling – Romy is a CEO and Samuel's boss, but Samuel has knowledge about her no one else does and, perhaps more interestingly, he is a man. There is a messiness to what it means to have superficial power in a world that remains patriarchal, a novelty to the incongruence of having power and then immediately relinquishing it. What's frustrating is there’s very little done with this and it mostly just leaves open-ended questions that are far less compelling. Why set this film in an office if the potential consequence of them getting caught there is taken off the table so early on? Why have her be his boss if there is no substantial push and pull of this dynamic? How does this story change really if they were just two strangers on the street pursuing this? At a certain point in the story, it wouldn’t matter if it was set on a pirate ship.
The answers to these questions rely on its unwillingness to meaningfully deal with the thesis it puts on the table: women’s submission is pervasive and women enjoy the tension of being submissive in a world that increasingly asks them to be more independent.
When I think about Catherine Breillat’s films, where she often posits that women default to masochism, in some cases arguing that it’s their natural response to violent men, it's messy and interesting, and I say this as someone who dislikes Breillat's work more than I like it. When Joanna Arnow argues in her film The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed (2023) that submission and masochism feel compulsive, and that sexual desire, at times, feels like a chore that must be dealt with (see her listlessly masturbating wearing a pig nose), it’s a perspective that’s explored expansively and is emphasised by form, the millennial malaise radiating off the screen.
When I watched Babygirl, I came to the conclusion that it exists to affirm whatever sexual compulsion I have, presenting the still somewhat controversial idea that women shouldn’t be punished for their sexual fantasies and that the most feminist thing we can do as an audience is support Romy in her journey towards creating a language of sex that she can share with people honestly and without hesitation. No one’s yum is getting yucked. End of story. We can all go home.
I have to be the buzzkill. I just have to.
The biggest problem with the film is it fails to significantly emulate or even really subvert the formal language of an erotic film, the frame timidly lingering on the movement of bodies, the handheld camera movements emitting an anxious energy as opposed to the calm hand of a domme in control. Much of the film feels like Romy trying to convince herself and those around her that she's a normal woman with normal desires, and whilst this repressed energy seeping into the filmmaking may seem interesting, it undercuts every potential moment of excitement because the movie has to turn to the audience and hush us as if we were a startled horse who may buck at the slightest hint of immorality.
This is not just a directing problem either. It has no clue what to do with the tension it creates, for fear that it will come off as unfeminist if it questions its main character's actions at all. The fact that Romy was raised in a cult feels slapped on top of the film, as if a previous draft meant to pointedly untangle the traumatised woman from masochistic desire but it was deleted in favour of blandly explaining that these things aren't mutually exclusive. Not so much an interesting screenwriting decision as it feels imitative of a public service announcement.
If Romy was concretely held accountable for her infidelity, for exploiting her power over her employee, then it would, in the eyes of the film, undermine the argument that women and kink can coexist without it being exploitative to someone. However, without exploring these themes (despite conjuring and reiterating them to the point of exhaustion), there are no stakes. All conflict disappears. And look, this as a vehicle for hot people having sex with each other is not problem. But it does make me genuinely confused at the people calling it an erotic thriller.
To contextualise this film as an entity in the cinematic landscape for a moment, there has been a pushback against conflict in narratives for a while now. People want their escapism and they want their beliefs affirmed back to them, and to argue that a character they identify with could be exploitative or predatory or even just a bit shitty does cause a conniption. Unfortunately, this choice makes for weaker, less coherent and frustrating stories. I honestly think the most frustrating thing is that I could see the pieces of a tense story. So little would have had to change to turn this into a thriller. There is something exciting about a woman shirking off her ineffability so she can have a massive orgasm, regardless of what it may cost her.
As a fantasy, I'm sure it does work. The post-orgasmic clarity of your life returning to its equilibrium is very much the metaphor of the movie. Romy had this excursion and now it's business as usual. It's strategy masturbation. It's harmless. But it doesn't make for a film that stands out for its erotic sensibilities, instead opting for something far more tepid than I was promised. This film very clearly has its audience and I'm happy for them but my excursion into this film has me worried that this is the future of sex on-screen. Didactic, flat and unwilling to bring its audience genuine discomfort.