Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Nicole Kidman’s acting is not bad at the start of her new film Babygirl. But she is acting. Or at least her character is. Kidman plays New York chief executive Romy Mathis, who in the course of opening-scene sex with husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) gasps in orgasm. Later in the film, however, we see the real thing. The first one, we know now, was not it.The deal currently offered to older women actors sharpens into focus. Demi Moore may soon win an Oscar for embodying the horrors of Hollywood middle-age in The Substance. For Kidman, there is a star role in which she is to be seen having Botox, submissive fantasies and sexual releases whose tone and volume act as plot points.The movie is made to be a hot potato. The themes are flammable: the lot of senior women in corporate life, age-gap relationships, S&M. But it has no obvious agenda. “How inappropriate do you find this?” it asks with a smile.We next meet Romy at work. (Her business is automated parcel delivery.) A gaggle of interns have joined. One is less than fazed: Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a confident young man often on a cigarette break. Exchanges are loaded. Romy tells him to get her a coffee. He does, but tells her in turn she really shouldn’t drink it after lunch. For a moment, Kidman blanks.Is this old-school sexism? A bluntly non-hierarchical Gen Z just passing on a health tip? Or a bomb-drop flirt with kinky implications? Director Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies) makes sure we see each party notice the itch just under the skin of the other.Once the extramarital sex gets started, dynamics upend. Samuel takes a dominant role. Oh God, you think — a 51st Shade of Grey? But the frolics are more fraught with real-world stakes than that silken fantasy. Less po-faced too. Sexual experiments bring self-conscious laughter. Are we seriously doing this? The movie asks itself the same thing. Erotic thriller clichés loom. What time does the blackmail start? But Reijin likes setting traps more than springing them. She knows an anticlimax can be fun too. As a satire on business, Babygirl is sometimes coy. Except when it isn’t. Romy’s passing mention of growing up in “communes and cults” is there to be read as the making of a mind primed for sexual power games — or a certain kind of company leadership. “Who’s in charge?” is the other constant question. The answer changes a lot, though one is hidden in plain sight. In actuality, Romy’s Midtown office is the headquarters of studio backers A24.In a movie about sex, the performances are critical. Dickinson makes sense of a character whose mix of boyish gangle and bedroom mastery may have been easier to write than play. But that is even truer for Kidman, who puts nuanced flesh on the bones of Reijn’s ideas. The film involves much less nudity than it seems to. For the star, it is still exposing enough that you may wonder afterwards about the roles that now bring actors like Kidman and Demi Moore back to the film industry’s top table. Liberatory, or something more knotty? Babygirl may or may not have an opinion. Either way, you suspect Reijn would like knowing the film has got into our heads, and given us something to chew on. ★★★★☆In UK cinemas from January 10 and in US cinemas now
