The actress was unable to attend the award ceremony due to the sudden passing of her mother, Janelle Ann Kidman.
Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson. Credit: Niko Tavernise
The news was shared by director Halina Reijn, who read a message from the actress: "Today I arrived in Venice only to discover shortly after that my mother has passed away. I am in shock and had to return to be with my family. This moment is unbelievable, and my heart is broken."
Kidman then dedicated the award to her mother, emphasizing her fundamental role in both her life and career.
Isabelle Huppert, president of the jury, expressed her condolences to Kidman, highlighting the affection and respect everyone has for the actress.
She also praised Kidman’s extraordinary performance in "Babygirl", describing it as "powerful and fragile at the same time."
Halina Reijn, Nicole Kidman Credit: Niko Tavernise
About the film "Babygirl" by Halina Reijn.
In Babygirl, Romy, played by Nicole Kidman, is a polished CEO and a mother and wife living in New York City, she lives in a world of careful control, tight scheduling, and an all-too-keen awareness of how she’s perceived at the heights of a male-dominated field.
In her own long-term marriage, she has also never truly found pleasure with her sweet, caring, and artistically driven husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas).
In its deliciously playful provocations, Babygirl explores the tender, the wickedly funny, and the unexpectedly romantic places that a certain kind of repression can lead to, and where someone will go to find release.
As Romy attempts to hold together her gilded persona, she is quickly undone after she meets Samuel (Harris Dickinson), an intern who appears to her almost as an angel come to rescue and torment her from within her cage of suppressed desire. Immediately he clocks her, seeing in her a desire to finally lose control, and he begins to prod beyond the surfaces she has so carefully constructed.
So begins an unconventional love affair between the high-powered female CEO and her young, audaciously puckish male intern.
It’s a cat and mouse set-up, one in which the axis of power is constantly, thrillingly shifting, and which at first glance resembles the heyday of sexual thrillers in the ‘90s.
If Reijn was confronted with the contradiction of sexuality impressed upon women in society — to be constantly sexualized and yet to never exercise agency — she found vindication and solace, if a conflicted form of it, in the movies’ depiction of women getting what they want.
“Those movies, when I saw them, they were like, ‘Oh, actually, it's not so crazy, all these things that are going on in my head!’” she says.
“These movies are super dear to me, but of course they are almost all directed by men, all written by men.”
The genre is a male-dominated lineage, from Adrian Lyne’s 9½ Weeks to Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher.
“I really decided in the beginning, I want to make a sexual film, just as sexual as all these films that I've always admired so much, but now I'm going to do it completely through female eyes.
What does that mean and what does that look like?” In Reijn’s hands, the genre’s deliberate goading of sexual mores becomes something deeply human and bitingly fun, an erotic thriller for an age where everything is permitted, but the American puritanical moral impulses still run deep.
And ultimately, at the core of the forbidden fruit is a seductive, tender act of self-acceptance for its protagonist.
“My question was about self-love. Mainly, how do I love all parts of myself?” Reijn says. This line of thinking was inspired by Verhoeven, who directed Reijn, an actress before she became an acclaimed filmmaker, in a major supporting role in Black Book.
“Paul Verhoeven always told me I could only make a movie if I had a specific question. For this story I wondered: Are we animals or are we civilized? Can we make peace with the animal inside of us? Is it possible for the different parts of ourselves to co-exist and, in turn, for us to love our whole selves without shame?”
These ideas and Reijn’s approach — to take the edgy, titillating mold of sexual thrillers and witness it through a distinctly contemporary female gaze — was an utterly new experience for Kidman, who speaks about her time shooting the film as a fever dream of sorts.
Antonio Banderas, Nicole Kidman Credit: Courtesy of A24
Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson Credit: Niko Tavernise
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