Nicole Kidman brings eroticism to the Venice Film Festival. She does so with her new film, Babygirl, in competition for the Golden Lion and ready to shock the audience with an unfiltered story about the complexity of female sexuality. Behind the camera is a woman, Halina Reijn, and in front of her, in addition to Kidman, there are two excellent male performers: Antonio Banderas in the role of a loving husband and Harris Dickinson in that of a young and captivating lover.

The story told is that of Romy, a successful woman with a wonderful family and a brilliant and satisfying career. Unsatisfying, however, is her sexual life, too canonical for her erotic needs that are anything but standard. And it is precisely this dissatisfaction under the sheets and her sexual fantasies kept quiet from her husband out of shame that lead her into the arms of a boy much younger than her, the only one who succeeds in the enterprise that her husband failed to achieve for almost twenty years: that of making her have an orgasm.

Babygirl is a film that is very powerful in its intentions. This film, in fact, dares to overturn the rules of classic erotic cinema of the 80s and 90s by stripping it of every form of machismo and focusing everything on freeing women from modesty and the fear of other people’s judgment for their sexual desires, whatever they may be. Babygirl aims to break the taboos on female sexual pleasure, eliminates every form of prejudice and uses a visual language bordering on the disturbing to launch its message of female emancipation and empowerment. And beyond this, the film also talks about the importance of communication in couples, the relationship you have with your own body, the difficulty of expressing your most intimate needs.

But as noble as this film is in its intentions, unfortunately it has the great limitation of not being, in practice, as beautiful as it is in theory. Babygirl, in fact, is a film that does not render on the screen, mainly because of a plot that is too weak and not up to the important messages it wants to send to the public. There are many, and sometimes repetitive, sex scenes and too few, instead, those that are able to really make a difference on a communicative level.

Babygirl is a film that will be much talked about inside and outside the Venice Film Festival. Certainly not one of those that you will choose to watch again and again in your life but controversial enough to shake consciences and try to eliminate the usual prejudices about women and sex.

Disturbing but paradoxically ironic, rude but also delicate, wild but at the same time romantic. Babygirl is not an exceptional film but its discourse on female sexuality is very beautiful and for this reason it deserves to be seen, especially by women even just to erase once and for all that sense of guilt, that guilt, that shame for the simple fact of having sexual fantasies and having the courage to express them out loud.

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