Carlos Boyero speaks clearly about ‘Babygirl’: “I demand quality before gender ideology” | Culture

The new critical and popular success of Hollywood star Nicole Kidman, Babygirl, arrives this weekend in Spanish theaters. The film, directed by Dutch director Halina Reijn and co-starring actor Harris Dickinson, is a thriller erotic film for which the Australian actress has won the Volpi Cup for best actress at the Venice festival and a Golden Globe nomination, among other recognitions.

It is precisely Nicole Kidman’s role in Babygirl the only thing that film critic Carlos Boyero saves from the film. In this sense he titled his review this Friday in EL PAÍS, stating: “Only Nicole Kidman. I have plenty of the rest.”

According to Boyero, although the actress knows how to keep the viewer’s attention, the film is more pretentious than convincing. What seems like it is going to be “a twisted move,” that the erotic universe that the writer and director Halina Reijn is going to describe will be “strange, unconventional, militating in empowerment and transgression,” ends up losing the critic’s interest.

“It’s supposed to be a thriller. But it reminds me more of the empowered update of that stupidity about abrasive eroticism (…), a seeker of eroticism as false as it is sophisticated and titled Nine and a half weeks that on the dark and distressing side of the bright Basic instinct“says Boyero about Babygirl.

And although he claims to celebrate that the narrative of erotic fantasies in cinema no longer belongs mainly to masculinity, the critic asks much more of the writing of these stories: “I demand that they possess art, that they keep you in tension and that they let you footprint, that quality prevails before gender ideology.”

(Read Carlos Boyero’s complete review: ‘Babygirl’: only Nicole Kidman. I have plenty of the rest)