Venice Film Festival: Love and its Discontents

This year’s Venice finally has its first broadly acclaimed, talking point film: Babygirl, directed by Dutch actress-turned-director Halina Reijn and starring a steamily entwined Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson. Influenced by the more sex-laden commercial cinema of the 1980’s, Reijn - who has a prestigious theatre background in Holland - directs it as a pared-back two-hander, where Kidman’s corporate CEO Romy and Dickinson’s ambitious intern Samuel engage in a true dance of desire - only with pronounced BDSM choreography.

The discourse that has followed Babygirl to Venice, and will likely multiply on its general release, concerns modern cinema’s supposed sexlessness: a caution about carnality and nudity derived in part from MeToo’s cultural impact. Babygirl is quite compelling for that, but more so for how it reflects the world’s (or, indeed, the First World’s) changing mores towards sexual preference, eroticism and heteronormativity. Kidman’s theatre director husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) is a sympathetically conservative voice, questioning late in the film if female submission in kink is just a way to conceal misogyny. A great victory of this film is showcasing, although not sugarcoating, what a functional, but intense dom-sub relationship might look like, especially one liberated from the context of sex work and fetish clubs, in favour of traditional, monogamous relationships.

Another of the film’s bluntly ironic notes is that Romy has an oddly bland professional specialty, taking charge of shipping logistics at an Amazon-like multinational, but has a mind racing with transgression. Raised by countercultural hippies (which is reflected in Reijn’s own background), she twisted that philosophy of liberation to help her flourish in neoliberal capitalism, not unlike Sandra Hüller’s character in Toni Erdmann, one of the film’s important European touchstones along with Haneke’s The Piano Teacher. But as we see, there is so much more that lies beneath…

The mysterious Samuel (incarnated brilliantly and naturally by Dickinson) also has high corporate ambitions, but starts heavily making moves at his boss in a manner that not just risks a power-imbalanced workplace relationship, but also puts her in highly uncomfortable scenarios - sometimes in public - that test her boundaries; of course, this would be fully off-limits if it wasn’t part of his chosen “dom” persona.

Bonding with her queer, polyamorous daughter Isabel (Esther McGregor), Romy enjoys a sex-positive arc allowing her to find a truer self both in intimacy and life otherwise. Whilst impressive and well-performed, my nagging issue with the film is that there’s something tidy and contrived about it, where the characters behave arguably less sensitively and unpredictably than they would if it were more realistic. But maybe this film needs to be stylised - unashamedly chasing vintage Hollywood gloss and true titillation - instead of plausible and rigorous, to communicate best in the language it chooses.

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A well-meaning but underpowered and finally generic mix of crime thriller and issue movie, Justin Kurzel’s The Order is an entry in into the emerging cycle of American films responding to the January 6th assault on the Capitol building. In a country of rich diversity and many forms of religious expression, the danger of the extreme-right had been regarded as marginal - that is, until the upsurge that caused and sustains Donald Trump’s presidency.

So in a bid for relevance, a historic early 1980’s case for the FBI on an insurgent white supremacist group in the Pacific Northwest is elevated by Kurzel and screenwriter Zach Baylin into an apparent harbinger for today. With the real events lightly fictionalised, Jude Law is oddly cast but commanding and charismatic as tough-guy fed Terry Husk, an extremism and organised crime expert drafted into Coeur d’Alene, Idaho to monitor criminal activity by gangs linked to a local evangelical church.

Beyond some striking foreground detail showing the US’s now-normalised far right in an embryonic stage, Kurzel to no discredit also wants to make a red-meat genre film, and seems inspired by Michael Mann’s Heat in his portrayal of Husk’s adversary, the would-be messianic Neo-Nazi militant Bob Matthews (Nicholas Hoult, another unusual British casting). Developing into a cat-and-mouse chase as Matthews breaks from his church (who prefer a gradualist approach, aiming to place figures from their movement in electoral politics) to plan a monstrous mass-casualty bombing, The Order suffers in making its morality and rooting interests too simplistic: it feels odd heralding the FBI in a battle of good and evil that’s starkly defined like a classic western. But far too late, in the film’s final scene, it reaches a convincing piece of analysis, as a deer hunt by Husk becomes an analogy for the country’s continued appeasement of these malign forces.