The full title of that first film is Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. It’s a documentary written and produced by Springsteen and directed by his cinematic biographer of recent years, Thom Zimny.
It covers a lot of ground — a basic history of the band whose longtime members now find themselves in their ’70s but still keen to bring music to their fans on huge tours. They were off the road for six years, partly due to the pandemic, so at this stage they need some rehearsal to prep, and to play songs from Springsteen’s threnodial Letter To You album. Springsteen, naturally, is featured front and centre, but what makes this film so affecting and, I think, successful, is Zimny lets the E Street Band and the new E Street Choir do most of the talking.
They’re delightful, talented folk, and some have known The Boss for more than 50 years. They bring all the pathos and experience of decades of creative collaboration, and what that means when you’re a senior citizen playing rock and roll, trying to live up to and continue the legacy of a legendary live act. Good stuff.
Babygirl shocked me for being so good, but maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised: Written and directed by Halina Reijn, the Dutch director learned her craft from Paul Verhoeven and made the excellent Bodies Bodies Bodies. Nicole Kidman is Romy, a self-made business woman of a huge robotics company in New York, which reflects her manner: professional to a fault, unemotional, robotic. She has two teenagers and a loving husband, Jacob, played by Antonio Banderas, but he’s never given her an orgasm — after sex she masturbates to BDSM videos.
Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness, Scrapper) is Samuel, a new intern in her company — he’s much younger, but confident. He recognizes her dissatisfaction and they start a torrid affair where she gets the opportunity to explore this side of herself, games of consent and humiliation. Babygirl is a fascinating exploration of shame, power, and women’s pleasure, and it’s impressively explicit in its content. The director spoke after the screening, and she admitted the film is in conversation with that spate of erotic thrillers of the 1980s and ’90s, 9 and a Half Weeks and Indecent Proposal, but what makes it different is it’s framed through the female gaze, with a couple of fantastic needle drops — INXS and George Michael, represent. The crowd at the screening picked up on the film’s deep playfulness, too — lots of laughter, and not just of the nervous variety. The film is hot, provocative, but also considered.
