TIFF 2024: Babygirl, All We Imagine as Light, Queer

Three films that feel like they could be in the conversation come awards season comprise this Toronto International Film Festival dispatch of second takes on flicks we already hit at Karlovy Vary and Venice, led by further proof that Nicole Kidman is one of our best working actresses, a performer who has always been fearlessly willing to go wherever a character takes her. After “Big Little Lies,” Kidman has been a bit distracted by the Prestige Streaming mystery series (like “The Undoing” and “The Perfect Couple”) but she proves in Halina Rejn’s “Babygirl” that she is up for any challenge the film world still has for her. Kidman stars in a film that’s going to be controversial in its depiction of the complexity of desire, well-supported by equally great turns from Harris Dickinson and Antonio Banderas. This is a movie that I fear will be broken down into TikTok-able pieces or divisive character beats when it’s really best appreciated as a whole, charting the arc of a woman who discovers new truths about what turns her on.

“Babygirl” opens with two crucial scenes. In the first, Romy (Kidman) has just made love to her husband (Banderas) when she retreats to another room to watch porn and “finish the job” herself. She’s not being satisfied—the idea that a character played by someone almost universally recognized as one of the most attractive men in film history hasn’t satisfied his partner in two decades feels almost like a bit of a casting joke, but I digress. Shortly thereafter, on the way to her office, an off-leash dog runs toward her before being called and calmed by a handsome young man named Samuel (Dickinson). He’s in control. She likes ceding control.

It turns out that Samuel is an intern at Romy’s company, and he senses immediately that his confidence could be of sexual interest to this high-powered woman. Before you know it, he’s pulling weird control tricks like ordering a glass of milk for her from across the bar to see if she’ll drink it and pushing and pulling her into a twisting sexual dynamic. In every way, Romy is the more powerful figure in this new couple, but she’s clearly turned on by the opportunity to be dominated, although “Babygirl” doesn’t succumb to traditional BDSM filmmaking, movies that usually end up kink-shaming relationships like Romy & Samuel’s, ones that can tear families and professional lives apart. Romy is a risk-taker in her profession, and Kidman subtly captures how she sees Samuel as a danger she can’t ignore.

Kidman and Dickinson are vulnerable and raw, giving Reijn freedom to bounce those two electric performances off each other, until Banderas comes into the third act and also avoids all the potential traps of the betrayed husband role. “Babygirl” is a high-wire act, unafraid to touch the third rail of modern, sex-averse cinema—it’s just explicit enough that several people at the screening around me were murmuring and mumbling during its more graphic moments but it never feels exploitative or obscene. The reason it works is it’s a deceptively smart film, one that refuses to look down on any of its characters, including the cheating husband and the arguably manipulative intern. There are so many movies like “Babygirl” that don’t understand the emotion behind things like infidelity, power, and lust, using them as devices instead of primal aspects of the human condition. When one is done this well, it feels like a bolt of lightning.

It couldn’t be more different, but there’s an emotional lightning strike to the end of Payal Kapadia’s excellent “All We Imagine as Light” too, a movie that snuck up on me and walloped me with its final scenes. This is a gentle, ruminative film about how constrained lives still long for romantic connection, nuanced in its writing, acting, and direction. Kapadia’s film has been shortlisted for France’s submission for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It’s certainly one of the best I’ve seen so far this year.

Duality shapes “All We Imagine as Light,” from its pair of lead characters to the fact that it’s a film that is distinctly cut in two in terms of setting to the truths it unpacks about our need for connection with another person. It’s the story of Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), a pair of nurses in Mumbai who also happen to live together. Kapadia captures the soundscape of Mumbai—car horns mingling in the background of nearly every scene—in a manner that makes it feel full and three-dimensional, like these are merely two lives in a city of millions. They are both ordinary lives, and extraordinary in their detail.

The older of the pair, Prabha’s husband went to take a job in Germany a long time ago and has barely been heard from since. She holds onto a relationship with a man who may no longer even be alive, even pushing away the affection of a doctor who’s clearly drawn to this fascinating woman. Her counter is Anu, a younger nurse who is having a secret affair with a Muslim boy. When the women go to the coast for a holiday, “All We Imagine as Light” shifts in tone, ditching the constant noise of the city for the peaceful hum of the natural world. “All We Imagine as Light” is a tender, beautiful piece of work, a movie that revels in human complexity and need, reminding us that grace can find its way through any darkness.

Finally, there’s Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” another drama that seeks to grasp the ineffable but struggles to connect over its overlong runtime. The director of “Call Me By Your Name” and “Challengers” has made another gorgeous film—the costume design and art direction are captivating, and there’s another solid score from Reznor & Ross—but “Queer” attempts to adapt a source that’s about that which we cannot put into words: things like lust, addiction, and even telepathy. Author William S. Burroughs wrote a deeply personal novel about trying to capture that which he couldn’t quite express in any other way, and “Queer” feels a bit too manufactured to convey that primal aspect of the source. I’m not sure anyone can really adapt that part of Burroughs that can only exist in words and how those words spark the imagination of the reader. This one is a noble effort to do so, but it frustrated me more than anything else.

Daniel Craig gives his all to the role of Lee, clearly based on Burroughs himself, a writer in postwar Mexico City who spends most of his days drinking, drugging, and screwing, trying to find something to give his life reason, or at least pleasure. One of the best moments in “Queer” is when Lee spots Allerton (Drew Starkey) in the street and Guadagnino has the nerve to slo-mo drop in Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” for this period piece meet-cute. It’s not the only time Guadagnino uses modern music, but I wish he had done it more as it breaks up some of the tedium of a film that gets pretty repetitious as Lee and Allerton come together, break apart, and come together again on a trip to the Amazon to experiment with ayahuasca.

Craig is engaging and raw, but Starkey is a misfire here for me. Yes, Allerton is supposed to be a bit of a cipher, someone that Lee could never fully understand, but Starkey’s performance is too flat, mumbling dialogue and never really carving out a character. It leaves a black hole in the center of “Queer,” which becomes a story about a man unable to connect with the world around him, even the man from whom he draws sexual pleasure. Burroughs apparently called this tale one about “the algebra of need,” and that’s clear in the source but needing sex, drugs, or even meaning are truly difficult things to convey in 150-minute period pieces, and they’re ones that I don’t think Guadagnino’s film ever gets its arms around.