'Babygirl' Will Change Cinema
[Very Valerie Cherish voice] Babygirl!
It might be Brat Summer, but this fall is quickly shaping up to be Cougar Autumn with films like Halina Reijn’s Babygirl and Susannah Grant’s Lonely Planet being released and Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex going into production. This on the heels of a bevy of films including May December, The Idea of You and A Family Affair, all centered around older women lusting after, and in some instances romancing, significantly younger men.
Lonely Planet, according to press notes, centers around a celebrated, newly-single novelist (Laura Dern) who heads to a writers retreat in Morocco, where she meets and connects with a younger man (Liam Hemsworth). I Want Your Sex, according to press notes, sees Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) landing an exciting job for renowned artist Erika Tracy (Olivie Wilde), wherein his fantasies come true as Erika taps him to become her sexual muse. (It should be noted that Luca Guadagnino’s Queer as well as Todd Haynes’s “untitled gay romance” invoke a similar trope, albeit through a homosexual lens.)
But it’s Reijn’s’s Babygirl that I’m convinced will change cinema.
I was tempted to say “save” cinema, but we all know Nicole Kidman already did that in 2021 with the AMC ad. And how will Babygirl accomplish this feat, you might ask?
