Diksha Sundriyal
Directed by Halina Reijn, ‘Babygirl’ follows the story of a woman embarking on a dangerous path to explore herself and her sexual desires. The film stars Nicole Kidman as Romy Mathis, a woman who seems to have it all. She is in a happy marriage with a theatre director, Jacob, with whom she has two daughters. She is a woman in a position of power in a company, Tensile Automation, that is getting bigger by the year. At the same time, she is also an inspiration for other women to look up to. All in all, she is the perfect woman, or at least, that’s how others look at her. Inside, she feels anything but perfect, which is what makes her so relatable. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Romy Mathis and Her Fictional Company Were Created to Reflect Reality of Women
‘Babygirl’ is an entirely fictional story concocted by writer-director Halina Reijn. Romy, the company to which she dedicates all her time, and the complicated situation she finds herself in are entirely made up to support the plot. However, that doesn’t mean that all of it is based on fantasy. In fact, Reijn looked towards the stories of real women and their repressed lives to form the basis of Romy’s story. There were several things that pushed Reijn to write the story of a woman who is trying to figure out what she wants, but there was one incident that became the seed of the idea that eventually morphed into ‘Babygirl.’
In one of her conversations with a friend, she discovered that her friend had never had an orgasm in her twenty-five years of marriage. To Reijn, this wasn’t a shock simply because her friend had been sexually dissatisfied and couldn’t talk about it openly but also because it made her reflect on her own dissatisfactions, sexual or otherwise, with life. The core idea in the writer’s mind was how most women are caught in a circle where they try to be perfect for others in their lives.
At the same time, they struggle with the desire to acknowledge what they want for themselves, to be their authentic selves and not be judged or shamed for it. Because sexuality is something that women are mostly judged for, Reijn focused on that as the central plot element for ‘Babygirl,’ even though her core focus was on much more than that. To create a character that felt this conflict on a daily basis wasn’t something that she had to struggle with a lot. In fact, much of what we see happening in Romy’s mind reflects what Reijn once went through herself.
Halina Reijn Used Her Own Life to Feed Romy’s Past and Present
Halina Reijn has talked about feeling the imbalance of power dynamics during her years as an actress, where she was made to do all sorts of stuff in front of the people who would audition her. That part about performance percolated in her writing for Romy, and we see her playing all these different roles because she wants to keep the people around her happy by showing them that she is perfect for the role they have created for her in their minds. Similarly, Reijn tapped into her own insecurities with aging to make Romy go through the process of Botox and whatnot so she doesn’t feel inadequate. As a part of Romy’s backstory, we discover that she grew up in a commune where she was named by a guru. Reijn revealed that this part comes from her own childhood in a small Dutch village called Wildervank, which was cut off from others and functioned as a unit of its own, not like a cult or commune, but in similar veins.
Despite these similarities between herself and Romy, Reijn kept the protagonist a unique individual in her own right. She looked towards fictional people like Glenn Close’s character from ‘Fatal Attraction,’ and Ophelia from ‘Hamlet,’ to create a character who dares to explore their sexual desires but is not punished for it. This was a major point for her because she didn’t want the audience to think that a woman exploring her sexuality was a bad thing and that if one dared to do it, she would have to pay the price for it. Instead, the director wanted people to focus on the cost of wanting to fit into the idea of perfection and how it can destroy everything if a person is not truthful with themselves about what they really want. Romy’s story is a cautionary tale about the hazards of depriving oneself of their true identity and desires and how better things can be if one is simply honest with the people around them, but most importantly, with themselves.
Read More: Babygirl Ending Explained: What Does the Scene With Samuel and the Dog Mean?
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