The director of Babygirl has defended the on-screen age-gap romance between Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson.
Now, for those of you who haven’t heard about Kidman’s latest movie, then you’re in for a treat.
Babygirl follows the actress, who plays a high-powered CEO ready to risk her family and career when she begins a passionate and seductive affair with a young intern.
While the movie’s storyline has received some pretty rave reviews – especially those intimate scenes that have left a lot of fans hot and bothered – there’s one particular aspect that some people are trying to get their heads around: the age gap.
Kidman is 57 while Dickinson is 28, making some people question the ethics behind the piece.
A third also chimed in writing: “Oh well… another sh*tty movie about a younger boy with an old woman that no one asked for.”
But now the director-writer of Babygirl has weighed in on the issue.
Speaking to W Magazine, Halina Reijn said “it should completely be normalized.”
“If we see a movie where the male actor is the same age as the female actor, we find that odd. Which is insane,” the 49-year-old said. “It should completely be normalized that the age gaps switch and that women have different relationships.
“We’re not trapped in a box anymore,” the writer continued. “We internalize the male gaze, we internalize patriarchy, and we need to free ourselves from it. It’s really hard.”
Elsewhere, Reijn told the outlet that she wanted the sex 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 glamor scene from a Hollywood movie in the ’90s. That’s just not how it works,” she revealed.
“I found so much fun in the fact that America to me has a kind of suppressed relationship towards sex, and I do too,” she told the outlet. “I really relate to it. So America serves as a metaphor for my own struggles with this theme.”
Earlier this month, Kidman also spoke about the beauty of seeing an older woman explore her sexual nature on-screen.
“A lot of times women are discarded at a certain period of their career as sexual beings. So it was really beautiful to be seen in this way,” she told the Hollywood Reporter.
“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,'” she continued. “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.”
Babygirl is available to watch in selected theatres.
