The Cougar Complex - On Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, MILFs and Power Imbalances

Words: Nirris Nagendrarajah

When the writer Annie Ernaux was fifty-four, she had an affair with a student almost thirty years her junior, with whom she’d often watch films that depicted the affairs between older women and young men. “We came out disappointed,” she reports in The Young Man: “Irritated by storylines in which we found nothing that resembled our experience, films in which the woman begged and pleaded and ended up cast aside, destroyed.” 

For Ernaux — who, at the time, was a professor and divorcée with two sons — her lover was a portal to her past; an opportunity to act as an initiator into cultural domains; and a subject to dominate and transform into literature, which gave her immense pleasure. 

He was, she writes, “a kind of angel of revelation.”

In Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, the angel of revelation is Samuel, an intern and mentee played by Harris Dickinson, whose presence causes repressed desires to resurface within Nicole Kidman’s Romy: a CEO whose sexual needs are not being met. She encounters him on the city street, on her way to work, when a black dog, having escaped from its owner, is attacking someone, and Samuel finds a way to assuage the restless beast. 

“How did you get that dog to calm down,” she asks him. 

He tells her he had a cookie in his pocket, then changes the topic to assert his dominance: “I think you like to be told what to do.” 

Romy is dumbstruck; Kidman’s blue eyes darken, glow. 

Later, when he tells her he is the one who has power over her, that “one call and you’ll lose everything,” you can see in Kidman’s shell-shocked face that she is a mother who needs to be fucked, facing a proper motherfucker. After some trial and error, Romy — anxious; uncooperative — finally obeys Samuel’s command and gets on all fours on the floor of a seedy motel room, approaching his outstretched palm with a red candy in the centre of it. 

Kidman’s embodiment of the shift from humanistic to animalistic is so swift — it is as if she melts, softens before our eyes — that the tone of the film shifts into the erotic. He proceeds to tell her to get on her stomach (a position which she prefers to masturbate in while watching porn) and he fingers her to an orgasm that makes her feel like she’s going to pee. She receives a total blissed-out release, letting out a cry and needing to be held for a bit. 

“You can see in Kidman’s shell-shocked face that she is a mother who needs to be fucked, facing a proper motherfucker.”

Much has been written about the recent uptick of the representation of MILFs in films such as The Idea of You — starring Anne Hathaway as Solène a gallery owner and recently-divorced mother who has an affair with a member of a boy band her daughter Izzy used to like — and A Family Affair: also starring Nicole Kidman, here as Brooke Hardwood, a widowed writer who has an affair with her daughter Zara’s movie star boss. 

In both of these films, with the relative absence of a father figure, the daughters act as protectors to their mothers, who have the power both to berate and exonerate them. “You know I could have handled that you were dating him,” Izzy says in The Idea of You, after paparazzi have publicised Solène’s relationship: “It pisses me off that you lied to me.” But rather than letting it linger, she finds another note to end on: “The people picking you apart on the internet are disgusting. It’s because you’re a woman and it’s because you’re older than him. They hate you for it.”  

For Zara, in A Family Affair, her main fear is that her boss is going to hurt her mother and that by having her mother be in her professional life takes away from it. “You can’t have both,” Zara says: “You will never understand what it’s like to be your daughter.” But, like Izzy, Zara arrives at an insight by the end of the film: “Your happiness doesn’t take anything away from me. It should be a given and you deserve to feel happy, and you deserve to feel alive and to feel seen.” 

Is it the daughter’s duty to make their mother feel seen; or is it to help them see themselves?

“You look like grandma” - In Babygirl, one of Romy’s daughters, Isabel (Esther McGregor) serves a different function from her predecessors, not one of resistance or forgiveness, but a mirror. Early in the film, Romy catches Isabel making out with a neighbour’s daughter in their pool despite having a girlfriend, and confronts her about it the next morning. 

“I do like Mary,” Isabel says: “I was just having fun with Ophelia.” What Isabel does is show her mother a different perspective out of the situation, to not allow shame, guilt, humiliation and repression to take hold, but to be yourself in all your messiness. 

In this iteration of the cougar complex, a younger woman plays a pivotal role outside of romantic and sexual yearning. Esme (Sophie Wilde) is Romy’s ambitious assistant who goes above and beyond, pitching innovative ideas — such as creating a mentorship program to empower women in the company — and expressing a desire for a promotion, which Romy constantly defers.

Knowledge is the centrepiece here, as in all these MILF movies: the threat it proposes, the violence that it causes, the power it has to ruin the life you’ve carefully weaved for yourself. “My family is everything to me,” Romy tells Samuel after he crosses a boundary; but what is the upper hand here? This knowledge is what Esme satisfyingly wields to her advantage to get exactly what she wants. For having nothing to lose and everything to gain is the greatest strength of all, which is something that will forever be out of the MILF’s reach; abnormal as she is, with her perversions and her privilege, her potential for narrative development and her perpetual inability to calm the fuck down.