Cinema – “Baby Girl”: Who manipulates whom here?

Antonio Banderas cannot satisfy his wife. With this punch line, Halina Reijn begins her “playful and modest answer to the male” Eyes Wide Shut “, as she says. While Stanley Kubrick had only treated the topic of monogamy in his last film, which came out in 1999, the Dutch director wanted to know what would have been if the female part had lived out of extramarital fantasies.

Reijn has Tom Cruise, who (not only) was (not only) in Stanley Kubrick’s film Nicole Kidman’s husband, exchanged for the aged sex symbol Antonio Banderas: Theater director Jacob does not like it when his wife Romy, tough CEO of an Amazon-like Megakonzerns, submissive in bed and plays the tradwife with apron for her two daughters. Her master finds her master, from now on between unapproachability and loss of control of Romy-a performance that Kidman introduced the prize as the best actress in Venice-in a blood boy intern (Smart Ass Harris Dickinson in his first emergency so-erotic drama). Of course, all alarm bells are shrill: abuse of power, me too! But who manipulates whom?

The miracle boy contradicts Jacob’s conviction that masochistic women are a male fantasy, see through the secret desires of his superiors and address them like a dog who wants to be praised: “Good girl!”

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The initial constellation and individual scenes are strikingly similar to the Swedish Netflix series “Love and Anarchy”, in which the unequal lovers mutually take on samples of courage and also mixes up capitalist hierarchies much.

Reijn, who wants to turn against jammed US moral ideas, remains arrested. According to her own experience as an actress, she relies less on nudity than her male colleague dominating the erotic genre, works with an intimacy coordinator and wants to stir the taboo of the orgasm gap. “There were days of shooting when I thought:” I don’t want to have orgasm more “,” trusted Kidman to the British tabloid “The Sun”, which also led various German media to slippery headlines such as »too many orgasms: Nicole Kidman had to ›Interruption Baby Girl‹ shoot «(» Musikexpress «).

At the same time, Reijn wants to show a woman “who starts again without being punished”, as is otherwise the case in films (and in Ibsen’s tragedy “Hedda Gabler”, which Jacob is just staged here at the theater). But firstly, the supposed new beginning in “Baby Girl” is only possible with the help of an alpha male and secondly leads to the return to the small family. Side jumps still belong.

The Banderas, who has just been chosen again as the “sexiest man, is not emancipatory: While” Political Correctness has led to a censorship of the artists “, Reijn” has the strength and the courage to bring things on the screen that we all think. In a way we are prisoners of our own instincts. We are animals. ”After all, Jacob learned a different sex technology at the end of the film: fuck penetration.

»Babygirl«, USA 2024. Book and Director: Halina Reijn. With: Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas. 108 min. Start: January 30th.