‘Babygirl’ director justifies age gap in Nicole Kidman-starrer romance
Filmmaker Halina Reijn is proud of her innovative approach to onscreen romance.
Reign answered some burning questions about the new romantic thriller during an interview with W Magazine as the conversation turned to a recent trend in romantic movies.
“If we see a movie where the male actor is the same age as the female actor, we find that odd. Which is insane,” Reijn, 49, raised on Wednesday.
“It should completely be normalised that the age gaps switch and that women have different relationships,” she added.
The Bodies Bodies Bodies director urged the need to break free from the old-school expectations of romantic films.
“We’re not trapped in a box anymore,” Reijn added. “We internalise the male gaze, we internalise patriarchy, and we need to free ourselves from it. It’s really hard.”
She also revealed that the inspiration behind Babygirl‘s sensuality was a response to the erotic films popularised in the 1990s.
Reijn elaborated that she wanted initmate scenes to “feel incredibly hot and steamy and fun, but I also wanted them to be real.”
“Sexuality is stop-and-go. It’s never like a glamour scene from a Hollywood movie in the ’90s. That’s just not how it works,” she added.
“I found so much fun in the fact that America to me has a kind of suppressed relationship towards sex, and I do too,” Reijn said. “I really relate to it. So America serves as a metaphor of my own struggles with this theme.”
Kidman, 57, also reflected on the film’s impact earlier in December, telling The Hollywood Reporter that “a lot of times women are discarded at a certain period of their career as a sexual being,” so “it was really beautiful to be seen in this way” in Babygirl.
“From the minute I read it, I was like, ‘Yeah, this is a voice I haven’t seen, this is a place that I haven’t been, I don’t think audiences have been,'” Kidman added.
“My character has reached a stage where she’s got all this power, but she’s not sure who she is, what she wants, what she desires, even though she seems to have it all. And I think that’s really relatable.”
For those unversed, Babygirl stars Kidman as a married tech company CEO named Romy who indulges in a risky affair with an intern at her company named Samuel (played by Harris Dickinson, 28).