The screen lights up and Nicole Kidman’s face appears in an aerial view, moaning in apparent pleasure while making love to her husband; played by Antonio Banderas. After finishing, he goes to another room, turns on a laptop, lies down on the floor and begins to masturbate while watching a pornographic scene where the man submits the woman. His orgasm, now, is real. But he can’t scream. He can’t let go. She doesn’t want to be heard. Her desire is forbidden, secret. Your wish is frowned upon. After the scene appears the title of the film, little girl, and with just two minutes, it has already managed to be more provocative and current than most of the premieres that hit the screens every week.
The new film by Halina Reijn – who surprised people years ago with her slasher Body, body, body– appeared in Venice and was like an earthquake. The director is aware of this, because she goes without restraint in her dissection of female desire, consent, pleasure and taboos surrounding sex. The film is destined to divide the audience between those who will consider it nonsense and those who see it as a brilliant, daring, risky and feminist look at everything that no one wants to confront about a subject as central to life as desire.
At the end of the screening, there was even a derogatory cry against the film. It is impossible not to remember having seen little girl of another filmmaker, Jane Campion, to enter the field of thriller eroticism cost him his career with rawwhere the sexist attacks of critics, more focused on Meg Ryan’s nude, meant that no one saw the filmmaker’s pioneering look at female pleasure.
Now it is another woman who takes up the codes of thriller 90s erotica to bring other angles into a feminist perspective and open other discussions. Among others, one that will sting more than one: can a sexual fantasy of submission be feminist? Debates around sex have also become demagogic, which is unthinkable for many. But that’s what happens to Nicole Kidman’s character, a CEO of a company who has been experiencing sexual frustration for decades until an intern shares this fantasy with her.
The fact that she is his boss complicates everything and serves the director to introduce many other complex notions, such as power relations, which can be hierarchical, but which are also a question of gender. Who has the power in the relationship, she because she is his boss or he because he is a man? The director always talks about all this on the edge of the precipice, without being moralistic, sometimes with an ambiguity that can be frightening, but always with a courage that we are not used to seeing today.
The film is very aware that it can be interpreted in an ambivalent way, and that is why it allows some relevant highlights, such as the scene where Antonio Banderas, the deceived husband; and Harris Dickinson, the lover, explicitly debate this, on the question of whether or not this fantasy is a product of phallocracy. “It’s very old,” Dickinson tells him, opening one of the themes of the film, the struggle of two generations that understand desire and sex in different ways. This clarity is also manifested in the way this relationship is approached, always based on consent, a word openly pronounced on several occasions. Everything is permitted as long as it is agreed, desired and consented to.
The film is not only impressive in its discourse, but also in its staging. How can one say that there is a woman in front. The female gaze in the sex scenes, in the scenes of submission, where it never falls into fetishization or exploitation of bodies, makes everything fall into order. Add to that an icy photography, an excellent musical selection – the Dancing alone Robyn’s never fails―and scenes like the nightclub where bodies melt and kiss without distinction of gender under a strobe light. The result is without a doubt one of the most explosive films of the year.
All this would go off the rails if there were not a cast dedicated to the proposal. From Antonio Banderas as a progressive husband (a theater director) incapable of understanding female desire and anchored in the sexual frameworks of his generation to a Harris Dickinson who breathes eroticism from every pore. But above all with an unleashed Nicole Kidman in one of her most daring and complex roles. One that even serves as a trompe-l’oeil for the criticism she herself has received (at one point she gets Botox and is criticized for it). Only those who believe in this are capable of licking milk from a plate without falling into ridicule or fantasy. exploit.
A liberating story
Although it is a film that can polarize the public, it is also obvious that it can perfectly fit into a list of winners that will be chosen by the jury chaired by Isabelle Huppert, and this because little girl has something of Paul Verhoeven’s films, in particular She, with Huppert. It is no coincidence that Halina Reijn was Verhoeven’s screenwriter in the black book and at the film’s press conference, he explicitly stated that his idea was to make a film like the director’s but “with a female perspective.” He defined his work as a film “about female desire, but also about masculinity, about power and control.”
All human beings have a beast inside, but women were never allowed to explore that side. They didn’t let us be powerful, but they didn’t let us be weak either.
Halina Reijn
— Director
For the director, “all human beings have a beast inside them,” but women have never been allowed to express it. “Women have not been given the opportunity to explore that aspect. “They didn’t let us be powerful, but they didn’t let us be weak either,” he added, also believing that his work shows the generational clash on gender issues.
Nicole Kidman, who received a huge ovation, expressed her hope that the film would be received as “a liberating story” and stressed the importance of “having a woman’s perspective, who is the one writing it and directing it, and that makes it so unique. “It’s very difficult to talk about these subjects, and that’s why it’s important that this material is in the hands of a woman. With her, I knew that my body was never going to be exploited in front of a camera,” she added of a role that she admitted made her feel “vulnerable” and “exposed.” He even threw a dart at the festival by asking the host about the number of women in the running for the Golden Lion.
Antonio Banderas was also at his side, who highlighted the fact that such a film was shot in a time that he called “politically correct” that caused “censorship of cinema”, and that it was a woman who filmed it: “When I read the script, I said: finally someone who sees beyond, who has the courage to put on screen what we all think, because we are all prisoners of our instincts.
