Updated:2024-12-21 07:10 Views:114
It has been a ghastly year for American women — at least those of us who are not looking forward to being ruled by a claque of cartoon chauvinists — but a pretty rich year for women in the movies.
One of 2024’s biggest hits featured an unfairly maligned woman who channels her galvanic anger into a fight against fascism. (I’m talking, of course, about “Wicked.”) Demi Moore gave a scenery-chewing performance in “The Substance,” a gruesome body horror film about the pressure on women to stay nubile. Amy Adams starred in Marielle Heller’s supernaturally inflected “Nightbitch,” in which a woman starts to go feral, perhaps literally, amid the tedium of early motherhood. Mikey Madison was incandescent as a street-smart sex worker from a post-Soviet country in “Anora,” a movie that takes the silly Cinderella fantasy behind “Pretty Woman” and explodes it.
But perhaps the most unlikely feminist film of the year is the much-hyped, extremely kinky “Babygirl,” starring Nicole Kidman, which opens on Dec. 25. It’s a movie that satirizes the archetype of the girlboss but ultimately affirms it. On the cusp of our terrible new era, it felt, for all its darkness and perversity, like an artifact of a more optimistic moment, when equality seemed close enough at hand that the orgasm gap between men and women — something the movie’s director, Halina Reijn, often talks about in interviews — could be a subject of serious concern.
This wasn’t the takeaway I was anticipating going into the movie, though, in truth, I’m not sure what I was expecting. In a recent profile in The New Yorker, Reijn, a feminist, said she grew up idolizing the directors of 1980s and ’90s erotic thrillers like Adrian Lyne, the maker of “Fatal Attraction,” to which “Babygirl” has been frequently compared. That movie, about a female stalker with a shrieking biological clock, was so reactionary that it’s the centerpiece of a chapter in Susan Faludi’s book “Backlash.” Faludi quoted Lyne saying, of feminist professionals, “Sure you got your career and your success, but you are not fulfilled as a woman.”
At least on the surface, the premise of “Babygirl” seemed like one Lyne might appreciate. The film centers on Kidman’s Romy, an icy executive with an outwardly perfect life — big job, loving family, multiple homes — who suffers over her unrealized desire to be sexually dominated. It comes out at a moment of misogynist retrenchment both politically and in parts of popular culture. (No one who read “Backlash” should be surprised by the rise of tradwives.) So despite Reijn’s politics, I wondered if her film would be an augur of a new, postfeminist Hollywood moment. It’s not. If anything, the problem with “Babygirl” — and here’s the place to stop reading if you want to avoid spoilers — is that, for all its psychodrama, it lands on a message of female empowerment that feels a little trite.
Though it’s billed as a thriller, “Babygirl” is really more of a black comedy about middle-aged self-discovery. As Reijn said when she introduced the movie at a screening this week, she was animated by a very personal question when making it: “Is it possible to love all the different layers of myself, not just the ones that I like to present to the outside world?”
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Calls for school crackdowns have mounted with reports of cyberbullying among adolescents and studies indicating that smartphones, which offer round-the-clock distraction and social media access, have hindered academic instruction and the mental health of children.
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