Monthly Archives: January 2025

  • Babygirl

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Halina Reijn (2024)

    Romy Mathis (Nicole Kidman) is CEO of Tensile, a successful AI company in New York City.  She’s been married for nineteen years to Jacob (Antonio Banderas), a theatre director; they have two teenage daughters (Esther McGregor and Vaughan Reilly).  The first sound heard in writer-director Halina Reijn’s Babygirl – a sound that precedes the first image on the screen – is Romy’s moans.  She and Jacob are having sex; once it’s done, Romy gets up from their bed and walks into a nearby room.  Lying on the floor there, she turns on a laptop then herself by watching a porn film:  we can see and hear that this is more exciting to her than the session with Jacob was.  In a company promo Romy announces that the increasing power of artificial intelligence in the workplace makes ‘emotional intelligence in leadership’ even more important.  It’s not long before she’s signally failing to deliver on that front:  she finds herself in a sexual relationship with Samuel (Harris Dickinson), one of the latest crop of Tensile interns.

    Romy first sees him in the street outside the company offices.  Another man’s dog has got loose and, barking mad, heads straight for Romy.  Samuel calms the large black animal down quickly – it seems to Romy miraculously – and returns it to an apologetic owner.  Back in the marital bedroom, Romy tells Jacob she wants him to make love to her while she watches porn; he doesn’t seem keen so she tries something else (presumably) new, covering her head with a sheet while Jacob goes about his business.  He soon stops, telling Romy with an embarrassed laugh that what she’s doing makes him feel ‘like a villain’.  Jacob is currently directing a production of Hedda Gabler so it’s good news that Halina Reijn’s movie doesn’t conclude with her heroine committing suicide.  The story’s timeframe is only a few weeks – at any rate, there are Christmas trees in evidence almost throughout.  Romy’s affair with Samuel causes a crisis in her marriage but she and Jacob patch things up; Samuel, who (speedily) moves to a job somewhere in Japan, is gone but not forgotten.  The less good news about Babygirl is that it ends with Romy, in bed with Jacob, fantasising about Samuel and that black dog – a fantasy that yields her first-ever orgasm during sex with her husband.

    The film is very well acted by all three principals.  And, though this is damning with faint praise, it’s a relatively nuanced exploration of gender power relationships in the workplace – relative, that is, to recent movies like the fictional The Assistant (2019) or the fact-based Bombshell (2019), which also featured Nicole Kidman.  Yet Babygirl is essentially rather silly.  The who’s-exploiting-who dynamic of Romy and Samuel’s relationship is superficially compelling but this is really the story of one woman’s particular sexual needs – which don’t connect interestingly to her exceptionally successful professional life.  Reijn doesn’t, besides, make it convincing that Romy expresses these needs at work – even though the opening verbal exchanges between her and Samuel there are convincing, and funny.  When the new interns are introduced, as a group, to Romy, Samuel stands out by asking a tricky question; at this point Romy’s assistant, Esme (Sophie Wilde), hurriedly draws the meeting to a close before recommending Tensile’s mentoring scheme to the newcomers.  Romy bumps into Samuel again in the office refreshments area and asks him to get her a coffee – which he does, though not without letting her know caffeine’s bad for you late in the working day.  When she asks how he pacified the dog in the street, Samuel says he gave it a cookie; when she then asks if he always has cookies about his person, he admits with a chuckle that he does, adding, ‘Why, d’you want one?’  Next time their paths cross, he tells Romy he’s chosen her as his mentor.

    It’s here that Babygirl starts to wobble.  Romy tells Samuel she’s not part of the mentoring scheme; he refers to a list of names he’s received that shows otherwise.  Although Reijn doesn’t give much detail on the size of organisation that Tensile is, the idea of a CEO mentoring interns seems surprising – and it clearly comes as unwelcome news to Romy.  Yet she simply accepts what Samuel says, and she doesn’t query things with Esme, who presumably circulated the list of available mentors.  The rationale for Romy’s accepting Samuel as a mentee surely isn’t that she’s already smitten so likes the idea of seeing as much of him as possible.  In the film’s later stages, apparently unassuming Esme will instruct her boss to promote her in exchange for silence about the affair with Samuel; but we can’t be meant to infer that Esme engineered the mentoring relationship on the off chance that Romy would fall into the trap of getting romantically involved with Samuel.  There’s no good reason, in other words, for Romy to agree to mentor – except that Reijn is dependent on this to get the affair underway.

    At the first mentoring session, Samuel wastes no time.  He propositions Romy.  She protests briefly before kissing him.  The die is cast.  Whereas Samuel knows he now has the upper hand, Romy isn’t so quick on the uptake.  When they rendezvous in a hotel room, she frets that she may be exploiting Samuel because she’s a boss and he’s an intern and because of the large age difference between them; he matter-of-factly replies that he could get her fired ‘with one phone call’.  What’s more, when she vainly tries to assert her authority, he tells her she wants to be told what to do:  he can read her like a book.  A few ‘highlights’ from the trysts that follow … Samuel orders Romy to get down on all fours and she obeys, without even getting a cookie.  Another time, she takes up the same position and drinks from the saucer of milk Samuel has placed on the floor (they seem to be getting dogs and cats mixed up at this point).  He asks if she wants to take her clothes off; when she says no, he says, ‘But you will, won’t you?’ and she does – he, fully clothed, appraises her nakedness.  Samuel shows Romy tenderness – telling her how beautiful she is, calling her ‘babygirl’ as he holds her – and there’s shared intimacy between them but he’s always in charge.

    If the scenario involved a male CEO and a female intern, an intelligent film audience nowadays would see him as thoroughly reprehensible, however blatantly she gave him the come-on and whatever she then made him do.  Although the role of Samuel is probably underwritten, Harris Dickinson helps Reijn to exploit the relative ambiguity of the female boss-male underling set-up.  Dickinson is unassertively charming; he makes Samuel sensitive but not greatly vulnerable.  He sometimes does it tentatively but this young man is always trying to see what he can get away with.  But Reijn – presumably to underline that Romy’s position is less powerful than might be supposed – makes her too readily exploitable.  If she’s so sexually dissatisfied and hungry, how come she kept going with Jacob for nearly two decades without mentioning something?  She clearly hasn’t told Jacob before if his puzzled then hurt reactions to what now happens are to be believed.  As interpreted by Nicole Kidman, Romy is not a woman asserting herself professionally as a means of compensating for mute submission in the domestic sphere.  Babygirl would be more plausible if she explored getting what’s missing in her marital sex life in ways that didn’t complicate her working life.

    Tensile is a good name for a company headed by Nicole Kidman, whose Romy is hyper-sensitised to a degree:  you’re surprised Jacob and Samuel don’t get an electric shock touching her.  Kidman shows enormous technical skill – and is reasonably being praised for a ‘fearless’ performance – yet her role, for all that it’s a showcase for her talents,  feels demeaning, too.  The same goes, in a lesser way, for Antonio Banderas.  His emotionally truthful playing lends Jacob Mathis a credibility that the writing of the character doesn’t deserve:  Jacob’s culturally tony line of work enables Romy to appear at, then disappear from, a first-night backstage party; otherwise, Jacob might as well be a chartered accountant.  A subplot involving the love life of the Mathises’ lesbian elder daughter is no more than filler.

    In Babygirl’s penultimate scene, a male executive at the company – a man older than Romy – parks himself in her office, asks if she arranged for Samuel to head for Japan and invites her to his own house the following week when ‘I’ll have the place to myself’.  Romy tells the creep she’s not afraid of him and to get out.  You want to cheer her bold response – though it’s not clear, given how many people appear to know what went on between her and Samuel, why her anxiety to keep it secret has suddenly vanished.  This sequence seems to be inserted to show that normal service in contemporary screen depictions of the workplace has been resumed:  men are sleazeballs, women offer feisty resistance.  By now, though, it’s hard not to think Halina Reijn was less interested in exploring the complexities of Romy’s world than in crafting an ‘erotic’ thriller – an order of priorities that’s strikingly reflected, incidentally, in reviews of her film.  Plenty of critics are judging Babygirl‘s success primarily according to how steamy (or steamless) they found it.

    12 January 2025

  • The Damned

    Old YorkerFilm review

    La caduta degli dei

    Luchino Visconti (1969)

    An aristocratic, industrialist German family gathers to celebrate the birthday of its elderly patriarch.  The Damned’s early scenes focus on the contest for future control within the Essenbeck clan of their steel business but the larger political environment is instantly clear.  It’s February 1933.  As Baron Konstantin von Essenbeck (Reinhard Kolldehoff) dresses for dinner, a photograph of Adolf Hitler, alongside his own reflection in the mirror, looks back at him from the dressing-table.  The patriarch Baron Joachim (Albrecht Schoenhals), who is Konstantin’s uncle, though he loathes and scorns the ‘upstart’ Hitler, accepts that the Essenbecks need to do business with the new Nazi regime.  (The family and the business, as their name suggests, are based in Essen.)  Herbert Thallman (Umberto Orsini), husband of Joachim’s niece Elisabeth (Charlotte Rampling), is a fervently outspoken anti-Nazi, as he demonstrates during the birthday dinner.  Before it’s over, Joachim has announced his decision to replace Herbert as company vice-president with boorish Konstantin, who’s already an officer in the Sturmabteilung (SA).  Herbert exits the room in high dudgeon.  During the night, Joachim is found murdered in his bed.  The murder weapon is Herbert’s handgun.

    This opening episode gives a foretaste of how Luchino Visconti will direct The Damned.  Most of the actors deliver their lines emphatically – an impression probably reinforced by the dubbed English voices on the soundtrack and certainly reinforced by Visconti’s camera:  reaction shots at the dinner table record the characters’ all-too-easy-to-read facial responses to what they’ve just heard said.  There are two late arrivals at the party, Friedrich Bruckmann (Dirk Bogarde) and Aschenbach (Helmut Griem).  (The latter seems not to have a forename.)  As they drive together to the Essenbeck mansion, this pair’s speech rhythms are relatively natural; once they take their seats at the gathering, Visconti pins down their reactions, too.  Conflicting cultural outlooks are made as immediately, obviously clear as differences of political opinion.  As part of the evening’s entertainment, one of Joachim’s great-nephews, Günther (Renaud Verley), plays a classical piece on the cello, while his younger cousins, Thilde (Karen Mittendorf) and Erika (Valentina Ricci), the daughters of Elisabeth and Herbert, cutely recite birthday greetings to their great-uncle.  But Joachim’s grandson Martin (Helmut Berger) performs a drag act that shocks his old-school grandfather.  Done up as Marlene Dietrich’s Lola Lola, Martin is midway through the ‘Ein richtiger Mann’ number from The Blue Angel (1930) when news arrives from Berlin that the Reichstag is burning.

    Although Helmut Berger has an ‘and introducing’ credit on the film, this wasn’t his first cinema appearance, even in a Visconti picture:  Berger had also had a small role in Visconti’s contribution to The Witches, a 1967 anthology movie.  The two men were in a romantic relationship at the time The Damned was made.  Whether or not that influenced the importance of Berger’s character in the finished product, there’s no doubt Martin becomes the star of the freak show The Damned turns into.  The film’s poster shows him in his Lola Lola outfit under the tagline, ‘He was soon to become the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany’.  From the word go, Berger gives Martin traditional queer mannerisms but, as Pauline Kael pointed out in her review of The Damned, Martin ‘does just about everything except sleep with a man’.  He sexually abuses his underage female cousins, as well as Lisa Keller (Irina Wanka), a Jewish child who lives next door to Martin’s current girlfriend, Olga (Florinda Bolkan):  Lisa then hangs herself.  Martin eventually has sex with his mother, Sophie (Ingrid Thulin), Joachim’s widowed daughter-in-law; the incestuous assault reduces Sophie to near-catatonia.  She has been having an affair with Friedrich, an ambitious high-flyer in the steel company.  In the climax to the story Martin, now an SS officer, supervises his mother’s wedding to Friedrich before instructing the bride and groom to take cyanide capsules, which they seem almost relieved to do.  Martin and, through him, the Nazis assume complete control of the Essenbeck business empire.  Tomorrow belongs to them …

    Visconti includes a morning-after-the-night-before scene outside the Reichstag, including a roll-call of famous writers banned by the Nazi government (as part of the Reichstag Fire Decree).  He later stages, at inordinate length, the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in Bad Wiessee in 1934, dwelling on the cross-dressing and homosexual horseplay of Ernst Röhm’s SA paramilitaries before SS officers descend on their hotel and execute the ‘brownshirts’.  Visconti links the events in Bad Wiessee to the power struggle taking place within the Essenbeck family:  Konstantin, who has been blackmailing paedophile Martin, is among the brownshirt murderees; Friedrich and Aschenbach, arriving as part of the SS contingent, finish him off – though with Aschenbach giving Friedrich the instruction to shoot.  But the SA’s dirty weekend in Bavaria is symptomatic of The Damned‘s confusing (and perhaps confused) approach.  On the one hand, Visconti’s interminable parade of decadence has the worrying effect of substantiating the Nazis’ professed rationale for the Long Knives massacre – to stamp out moral turpitude.  On the other hand, the behaviour of the film’s arch-pervert Martin and his eventual triumph seem meant to serve as a metaphor for Nazism and its rise to power in Germany.

    The director’s complex biography might seem to justify an ambivalent approach to the tale he tells.  Born into the Milanese nobility, Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo, was gay, Catholic and Communist.  Visconti’s The Leopard (1963) was a fine elegy to the aristocracy of nineteenth-century Sicily and it’s worth noting that The Damned is a much blunter title than the Italian La caduta degli dei or its German alternative Götterdämmerung, which suggest a tragic, even regrettable, decline.  According to Visconti’s biographer Laurence Schifano, the real-life inspiration for Martin von Essenbeck was Arndt von Bohlen und Halbach, the Krupp heir whose father worked closely with the Nazi regime – but Arndt von Bohlen wasn’t born until 1938 and never showed the slightest interest in the family business.  When his father, sentenced to twelve years‘ imprisonment at the Nuremberg war trials, died in 1967, ‘Arndt gave up his shares [in Krupp] in exchange for an income of one million dollars a month and spent the remaining twenty years of his life in a whirl of rhinestones and spangles, reigning over a court of young men who adulated him and stole from him what they could, until he died of an AIDS-related disease in the spring of 1986‘.  Visconti may have had some personal sympathy for Arndt von Bohlen but he doesn’t show any sympathy for Martin von Essenbeck – or for any other major character in The Damned.  Without any suggestion that they once behaved more honourably than they’re doing now, there’s no sense either of a fall from grace.

    The script – by Visconti, Nicola Badalucco and Enrico Medioli – is replete with overcooked, tin-eared dialogue.  Sophie to Elisabeth, as the latter prepares to leave the country to join her escaped husband: ‘Don’t dream of coming back one day to find a Germany which was so dear to your heart. … There will be no other Germany but this one, and you will not be able to escape it for it will spread before you know it all over Europe and everywhere!’  Martin to Sophie, as they hurl home truths at each other: ‘It’s you, mother. You, who’s always been my nightmare. You were the oppression, with your will to subjugate at all costs’.  On paper, The Damned is lavishly ridiculous to an extent that might be grotesquely entertaining; in fact, it’s so sclerotic and long-winded that it quickly palls.  But probably just as well to feel alienated by the film, given its grim historical context and the questionable use Visconti makes of this.  There were one or two plot strands I didn’t understand.  Aschenbach, another of Joachim’s nephews but consistently more interested in serving the regime than the steel industry, proves himself an accomplished strings-puller but disappears suddenly from the film, along with Günther who, when he learns that Herbert was framed for the murder of Joachim by the actual killer, Friedrich, joins Aschenbach in the SS.  Perhaps we’re meant to assume that urgent political business leaves Aschenbach and Günther no time for family squabbles, let alone kinky sex.  With Sophie a zombie and Friedrich, once he’s deprived of her support, exposed as a craven man of straw, I wasn’t sure why they needed either to marry or commit suicide – surely Martin, as blood heir to the family fortune, would inherit regardless?   I can’t pretend I was too bothered, though:  by this stage, I was just impatient for The Damned, which runs 156 minutes, to end.

    The film Visconti made lasted even longer – 168 minutes.  The scene of Lisa hanging herself was cut, thank goodness (what remains is just a shot of the child’s dangling legs).  The American censor removed some of the Bad Wiessee stuff – presumably because of the sexual content but it’s hard not to be grateful for the decision, considering how protracted the episode still is.  Visconti himself had already jettisoned some of what he shot.  Dirk Bogarde expressed disappointment that he privileged Martin at Friedrich’s expense – in particular, that a scene in which Bogarde’s character is overwhelmed with guilt for murdering Joachim, ended up on the cutting-room floor.  It was Visconti’s decision to opt for a dubbed English and German version of the film for The Damned’s international release.  It’s so unusual nowadays to hear a dubbed film; although it’s the real voices of all the main actors (except for Umberto Orsini, according to Wikipedia) on the soundtrack, the dubbing gives proceedings an extra layer of artificiality.  Maurice Jarre’s music is a weird concoction:  it’s often melodramatically sinister but Jarre seems not to have quite got ‘Lara’s Theme’ from Doctor Zhivago (1965) out of his system – a similar melody keeps tinkling into the score, most surprisingly in the big incest scene between Martin and his mother.

    The dubbing and the over-deliberate camerawork aren’t the only things wrong with the high-powered cast’s performances.  Ingrid Thulin, one of Bergman’s top actresses, is particularly hard to take, especially when Sophie applies lipstick – an action that Thulin executes so decisively she makes Joan Crawford look subtle by comparison.  Dirk Bogarde isn’t at his best.  This could be because Visconti excised his best moments though I suspect it’s rather because Friedrich, like all the other characters, is too narrowly conceived:  Bogarde expertly signals early on that the man he’s playing is conflicted and weak, and the part gives him no scope to show much else.  It might be thought that, as a pointer to the future, the film is most remarkable for the advent of Helmut Berger, whose feline beauty is undeniably a kind of star quality.  I prefer to think we have The Damned to thank for two superior films of the early 1970s – one a Visconti picture, the other also set in 1930s Germany.   It was presumably their collaboration here that led Visconti to cast Dirk Bogarde as Gustav von Aschenbach in Death in Venice (1971); the international exposure he got through The Damned surely helped Helmut Griem land the part of Maximilian von Heune in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972).  As the suavely steely Aschenbach (presumably a coincidence that he has the same surname as the Death in Venice protagonist), Griem is bound to be more obvious than he would be as the richly ambiguous baron in Cabaret a few years later – especially since Visconti gives him so much to say.  Even so, Helmut Griem’s tonal mobility – in his face and in his voice – is water in the desert of The Damned.

    12 January 2025

     

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