Wives on the Edge in ‘Babygirl’ and ‘Black Doves’

Maybe it’s the time of year, but lately I’ve been thinking about Nora, Henrik Ibsen’s whirling, frantic heroine. A dollhouseoverspending on Christmas presents, quietly running his household in ways that cannot be seen, and twisting himself into knots of gaiety and performance that can only be untied. Relationships can take a lot, the play argues, but not false intimacy—no pretense about something that should be sacred. A dollhouse also emphasizes how easy it is to get caught up in playing a role, especially one that is lavishly rewarded.

Romy (played by Nicole Kidman), the unexploded bomb around whom the new film Baby girl is built, is one of Nora’s heirs. So is Helen (Keira Knightley), the laughing politician’s wife and dutiful mother of twins in the Netflix series Black Pigeonswho happens to be a spy operating under deep, deep cover. Both Baby girl and Black Pigeons takes place at Christmas time, which allows me to argue that the former is the most honest kind of Christmas movie – not a cheerful fable about a rotund home invader, but a fierce portrait of a woman teetering on the edge. And gladly Black Pigeons and A dollhousethe film centers on a person who is simultaneously dying to blow up his “perfect” life and itching to protect it at all costs.

Since Halina Reijn’s film premiered at the Venice Film Festival this summer, where Kidman won the Volpi Cup Award for Best Actress, Baby girl has provoked debate about its exploration of desire, deception and power. Romy is the impeccably put together and impossibly tense CEO of an automation company whose pioneering work in robotics and artificial intelligence feels almost too on the nose. Romy is pared down to the subtle Botox shots that limit her expression and the tall femme power suits in dark pink that register her as a compassionate girl boss. But is she human? While attending her office party, then her husband’s cinema premiere (Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler), and then her family’s Christmas dinner at their picture-perfect house outside New York City, Romy shifts fluidly between different identities. None feels authentic, at least until a messy affair with the unsettling, slightly wild Samuel (Harris Dickinson) prompts her to try a new kind of role-playing.

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Much has been made of it Baby girl‘s sex scenes where Samuel, who is both disturbingly fearless and bizarrely intuitive, senses that Romy wants someone to dominate her – not out of humiliation and disgust, but as an expression of care. In the film’s early moments, Romy walks over her husband and simulates orgasm before rushing to her laptop to indulge in what really turns her on; she packs lunches for her two daughters wearing a rose-patterned apron and slips in handwritten notes that will surely devour them; she sits in her corner office and welcomes a new class of interns, among them Samuel. Each of these roles involves catering to others, but what Samuel understands is how much she longs to relinquish control, to give up decision-making, to be strictly told what to do. Reijn, who also wrote Baby girleasily suggests that Romy’s freewheeling childhood in a cult helps explain her eroticization of authority, but Romy’s drive for risk feels like more than that: It’s the only way she can critique her idealized existence. “There must be danger,” she explains late in the film, trying to understand what she really wants. “Things must be at stake.” The push-pull between safety and survival is the film’s most fascinating element. As Nora says to an old friend in A dollhousefaced with the possible airing of her secrets, “A wonderful thing is about to happen! … But also terrible, Kristine, and it just can’t happen, not for all the world.”

Through this lens, Kidman’s performance as Romy lingers long after the final act; it is an unsettling mix of restraint and abandonment, austere calm and elemental surrender. The film is part of Kidman’s series of works where she embodies artistry before imploding it as we watch. As an actor, she also seems attracted to risk and to the freedom and satisfaction that can come with acquiescing to another person’s creative vision. Before she was a director, Reijn was a classically trained actor who played a “unkempt and suicidal” Hedda Gabler (as one profile put it), among other roles, before developing debilitating stage fright in her late 30s. What both she and Kidman seem to be saying with Romy is that no loneliness is deeper than realizing you don’t know yourself at all—and that the comforts and milestones you once longed for have become anchors that threaten to pull you under.

Helen (not her real name), Knightley’s undercover agent Black Pigeonsoperates in much the same space as Romy and Nora: Her family is a huge lie that she will fight to the death to preserve. The Netflix series, written by Joe Barton (creator of the underrated crime thriller Giri/Haji), is a darkly funny, thrillingly brutal, ridiculously self-aware yarn about underground crime networks, diplomatic crises and espionage. Like Baby girlbut it’s also about human connection and the unbridled joy of being with the people who make you feel most yourself. Helen is a member of a private spy syndicate called The Black Pigeons, which is run by an elegant woman known only as Mrs. Reed (Sarah Lancashire). Unlike spies who serve their country, the black pigeons work for cash and sell secrets to the highest bidder. When Helen was recruited, it was because Reed sensed that she was a thrill seeker with a flair for violence and a cool head in a crisis. For 10 years “Helen” has been married to a Conservative Member of Parliament who is now the Secretary of Defense, bearing his children and stealing his cases. In the first episode, we learn that (a) she’s had an affair, seeking some release from the constraints of her fake daily existence, and (b) her lover has been murdered, leaving a trail of bloody retaliation underway and the almost constant threat of exposure. (The effort to maintain her triple life, at one point, almost gets her killed when her daughter FaceTimes while Helen hides from assassins.)

Barton seems to enjoy juxtaposing the banality of Helen’s life as a wife and mother—hosting her husband’s holiday work party flawlessly and putting jewels on a crown for a birthday suit—with the extravagant action of her secret life. Helen has been styled (on purpose, it seems) to look like Kate, Princess of Wales: hair in long, loose waves; dressed in an endless array of expensive sweaters; and smile, smile, smile. In one scene, Reed describes Helen as “a coiled spring,” and the latter’s performance of holiday cheer is so committed that you can only faintly sense that she’s cracking at the edges. When Helen finds herself in danger, Reed calls in his former work partner, Sam (Ben Whishaw), and his pairing with Helen is, for me at least, what makes the show so fun. “Hey, baby,” Sam tells her, immediately after blowing the head off one of his assailants with a shotgun. Helen, covered in more blood than Carrie at prom, cowers in joy and gratitude. “I can’t believe you’re here,” she sighs.

Black Pigeons is best appreciated if you don’t think too much about the logical holes in the plot and just enjoy the spectacle. But there’s also much more to Helen than one might expect from the genre: more sympathy for how suffocated she is by her fake marriage, her own perfect display of domesticity, her unexpectedly tender impulses as a mother that destroy her ability to just do her job. The show’s most ruthless bosses are all women – Lancashire’s Reed, Kathryn Hunter as the wormily sinister director of a league of assassins, Tracey Ullman in a cameo I won’t spoil – suggesting they’re all good at secrets. For Helen, however, her fake life has become so dominant that it has replaced her identity as a person in her own right. “I wake up sometimes and I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, Sam, because I have no idea who I am,” she says in one scene. “And neither does anyone else.”

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In the end Black Pigeons suggests that Helen, like Romy, may be better off at home, but that her fearlessness and risk-taking have shown her something about what she really wants. Late in the series, confronted in a shop by an interloper who has tried to infiltrate her family, Helen kills her with a pearl necklace – the fraught symbol of class and status – and then lets her go, screaming: “I’m still Helen Webb and Helen Webb don’t stab girls to death in jewelry stores on Christmas Eve.” I laughed at the line and at Knightley’s regal meltdown. But it also seems to signal that all of Helen’s adventures have led her to a better understanding of herself and to acceptance. That shift is enabled by Sam really seeing her , and—better—sees someone worth knowing. That’s the kind of validation that can make everything else about her life and her Christmas—the strategizing, the emotional regulation, smiling– just so much easier to carry.

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